The Stardroppers by John Brunner Page A

joke about “stardropping out.” The members of the commune were the Carltons’ age or younger, clean but shabbily dressed, with the indefinable stamp of the social rebel. Here, in utter contrast, the atmosphere was that of a heavily patronized bar in some prosperous business district: the men wore well-tailored suits, the women and girls had fashionable outfits and expensive coiffures, not to mention jewelry restrained enough to be very valuable. And they were drinking vodkatinis or dry sherry.
    The sheer paradox of it confused him terribly. When else in all of history had people joined smart social clubs to meddle with something equally dangerous?
    Oh, maybe in ancient China they had fireworks parties and amused themselves elegantly with that newly discovered substance, gunpowder!
    Affable, Watson spotted him and came over to greethim. Having bought him a drink, he invited him to meet some of the members. As he was piloted from group to group, Dan caught snatches of conversation, but like the articles in the hobby magazines he’d read, it all seemed dismayingly remote from the reality of a girl who had vanished from her tiny attic room, or a father mourning the loss of a son he did not believe dead yet never expected to see again.
    “—but the whole question of subjective-objective comes in here, so let’s not get metaphysical. Objective so far as we are concerned means you can make it do things. Postulate a field such that—”
    “—concede that an installation like his certainly uses a lot of power, but where’s the benefit in that? Anyone could hook a ’dropper on a thirty-two-thousand-volt power cable and the signals would be heard from here to Yucatan, but it’s a waste of effort,
I
think—”
    Those speakers were both serious, intense young men, illustrating their points with slipsticks. Others were struggling, their eyes haunted, to get across meanings they were convinced no words could properly express. They seemed infinitely distant from anything Dan had encountered in other contexts.
    “—nature of the signal in Berghaus’s view. I mean, identity of function isn’t identity of nature. Department of truisms now open.” This was a man of about thirty in an old suit, his hair rumpled, his eyes fierce and bright behind strong glasses. “To say this is what the signals are
like
tells you precisely nothing. Any day now someone may work up an explanation without reference to psychic continua at all.”
    On his left a girl with shoulder-length fair hair, dressed in lounging culottes and a fashionable tunic of imitation feathers, gave a slow headshake. “I think you should try being a bit more humble, Jerry. To my mind the first thing the signals convey is what they are. Just by listening you get this instinctive sense you’re eavesdropping on the minds of the universe at work.”
    “Maybe it does to you, Angel. To me it says nothing of the kind. You’re just oversusceptible. Your imagination was caught by Berghaus’s idea, and bang! It was revealed truth.”
    The girl he had called Angel raised one eyebrow. She was very pretty, but her face was drawn and tired. She said, “Well, well! Jerry Berghaus plus, I presume! You know as well as I do that Berghaus approached the matter with an open mind—”
    “And leapt miles ahead of any objective evidence!” snapped Jerry.
    “Because he experienced for himself the self-identifying information in stardropper signals!” the girl flared.
    Watson excused himself to Dan in a whisper and went through to the other half of the hall; there were some sort of preparations going on the dais, presumably for the promised demonstration.
    “Look,” the man Jerry said with careful patience, “no one disputes that Berghaus accounted neatly for precognition. What I’m saying is that when he came to stardropping he applied Occam’s razor needlessly and stretched his precog theory to include that too simply because of the one factor they had in common: neither