Invaders From Earth

13

Two days that were not days, two nights that were not nights, while the greater darkness of the Ganymedean night cloaked the outpost for the full twenty-four hours of the arbitrarily designated “day.” And in that time Kennedy saw the Ganny chieftain twice.

He told Engel, “You arrange with Gunther that you get assigned to take me out on my daily tour of the snow dunes and local lakes. Only we’ll go to the village instead of rubbernecking around the hills.”

Engel was unwilling. Erigel scowled and grimaced and tried to think of reasons why the idea was dangerous, but in the end he gave in, because he was a weak man and both he and Kennedy knew it. Kennedy had long since mastered the art of manipulating people en masse; now he was manipulating one single man, and succeeding at it.

He had five days left on Ganymede. He knew he had to make the most of them.

During the following day Engel came to him and told him to get ready for his daily drive. They skirted the hills and the big lake west of the camp, then swerved one hundred eighty degrees and tracked straight for the Ganny village.

They spent two hours there. The old leader explained the Ninefold Way of Righteousness to them, the essence of the Ganny moral code. Kennedy listened and memorized as much as he could—letting it soak in, because he knew it was good and workable—and occasionally glanced at Engel, and saw that the linguist was not blind to the wonders of these people.

“You see what kind of people they are?” Kennedy demanded, as they rode back to the outpost.

“Sure I see what they are,” Engel grunted. “I’ve known it from the start.”

“And yet you’ll stand by while they’re being wiped out by Terran forces who’ve been deluded into thinking they’re killing hostile alien demons?”

“What can I do about it?” Engel asked sullenly. “I’m a Corporation linguist. I don’t argue with what the Corporation wants to do. I just think about it, inside, and keep my mouth shut.”

Of course you do, Kennedy thought. The way we all do. But for once I can’t sit by and collect my check and let this thing happen. I have to stand up and fight.

He wondered what Gunther would say when he found out that the visiting public relations man was engaged in a highly subversive series of contacts with the Gannys. The little man would have an apoplectic fit, certainly.

Kennedy found out soon enough. He had been making notes of what he recalled of the old man’s talks, scribbling down his recollections of Ganny poetry and fragments of the philosophical discussions. He kept these notes hidden in his room. But on the fourth day, when he went for them to add some notes on Ganny ideas of First Cause, he found they were missing.

For a moment he felt thundering alarm. Then he thought, in a deliberate attempt to calm himself, Engel must have borrowed them. Sure. Engel borrowed them.

There was a knock on the door. Kennedy opened it.

Gunther stood there. Gripped tightly in his hand was Kennedy’s little sheaf of notes. His eyes were bleak and cold.

“Would you mind telling me what the hell these things are?” he demanded.

Kennedy struggled for self-control. “Those? Those are my notes. For my work, I mean. Research and comments to help me in my project.”

Gunther did not smile. “I’ve read them. They are notes on Ganny culture, philosophy, and poetry. You’ve been seeing the Gannys secretly.”

“And what if I have?”

“You’ve been violating a direct order of mine. This is a military-discipline base. We don’t allow orders to be violated.”

“Give me my notes,” Kennedy said.

“I’m keeping them. They’ll be sent back to Earth to the Corporation heads, as evidence against you. You’re under arrest.”

“On what charge?”

“Espionage against the Corporation,” Gunther said flatly.

Two spacemen of the outpost locked him away in a brig down below, and left him in a windowless little room. He stared glumly at the metal walls. Somehow, he had expected this. He had been risking too much by visiting the Gannys. But listening to them had been like taking drugs; for the first time he had found a philosophy that gave him hope in a world that seemed to be without hope. He had wanted desperately to spend every one of his few remaining days on Ganymede in the village.

The day passed. Night came, and he was fed and the door was locked again. Gunther was taking no chances. They would pen him up in here until the time came to ship him back to Earth.

He tried to sleep. For the past few days he had been getting along on two and three hours of sleep each twenty-four hour period, stealing out each night to visit the Gannys, and he was showing it; his feet felt leaden, his eyes stung. He had been subsisting on no-sleep tabs and catching naps at odd moments when he felt he could get away with it. But now he could not sleep.

His watch said 0330 when he heard the bolt outside his door being opened. He looked up. Maybe it was Gunther coming to extract some kind of “confession.”

Engel entered.

“I got put on guard duty,” the linguist said. “Gunther wants you watched round the clock.”

Kennedy looked at him bleakly. “Why did you come in here? To keep me company?”

“I wanted to tell you that I had nothing to do with his finding out. He’s just a suspicious man. He had your room searched while you were out, and he found your notes. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry too, Kennedy thought. Because now I’ll go back to Earth under guard, and I won’t ever get my chance to expose things.

He said, “Did you ever go back to the village to explain why we didn’t show up for your next session?”

“No. I was afraid to.”

An idea formed in Kennedy’s mind. “How about letting me out now? We can borrow a jetsled. Everyone’s asleep. At least we can warn the Gannys of what’s happened. You can bring me back here and lock me up again in the morning.”

“It’s too risky. Gunther suspects me as it is,” Engel said.

But Kennedy knew his man. It took him only a few minutes more of persuasion to break down Engel’s resistance. Together they donned spacesuits and headed out to the area where the outpost’s jetsleds were kept. Kennedy was bursting with impatience to see the villagers once again. He realized he had violated a prime rule of the Ganny way by compelling Engel to release him, but this was no time for passive resistance. There was time to put the Ganny philosophy into operation later, when the survival of the Gannys was assured.

“Set the airlock to automatic open-close and let’s get out of here,” Kennedy called to Engel. “We don’t have all night.”

The face behind Engel’s breathing-helmet was stiff and tense. Engel had never entered into any of this with full willingness, Kennedy thought; it was always partly because he thought Kennedy was right, partly because he was being blackmailed into accompanying him.

The airlock started to slide open. Kennedy made room for Engel on the sled and rested his hand lightly on the firing switch.

Floodlights suddenly burst out blindingly all over the airlock area.

Gunther stood there, looking hard and bitter in the bright light. Behind him were three other men—Jaeckel, Palmer, Latimer.

“It had to be you, Engel,” Gunther said slowly. “I figured you were the one that was helping him. That’s why I put you on guard duty tonight. And I guess I was right. What the hell do you think you’re up to on that sled, you two?”

Engel started to say something, something shapeless that was half a moan. Kennedy nudged him viciously with his free elbow.

“Hold on tight!” he whispered. “I’m going to get the sled started!”

“No, you can’t!”

“Want to join me in the brig, then?”

“Okay,” Gunther called. “Get off that sled. This time I’ll make sure neither of you can get loose until that ship leaves for Earth.”

“You make sure of that,” Kennedy said. Calmly he threw the firing switch to full and shoved the thrust-control wide open.

The jetsled bucked and crashed forward in a sudden plunging motion, tossing a spume of yellow flame behind it. Kennedy heard Gunther’s angry yell as the sled passed through the open airlock perhaps fifteen seconds before the time-control was due to close it again.

There was the quick harsh chatter of gunfire coming from behind them. Kennedy did not look back. He crouched down as low as he could on the sled, praying that none of the shots would touch off the fuel tanks behind him, and guided the little flat sled into the Ganymedean darkness.

His course was already figured. He would circle wide to the west, far out enough to mislead any pursuers, he hoped, and then head for the Ganymedean village. But after that, he had no plans.

He had bungled. And perhaps he had cost the Ganymedeans their one chance of salvation, as well as cutting his own throat, by letting Gunther find out what he was doing. He tried to regard the situation fatalistically, as a Ganny might, but could not. It was tragic, no matter how he looked at it, and it could have been avoided had he been more careful.

He forced himself not to think of what would happen to him four days hence, when the supply ship blasted off on its return trip to Earth. No doubt he and Engel would be aboard as prisoners. He had cut loose all bonds with Earth in one sudden frightful moment, and he tried not to think about it.

“I was wondering how long it would take for Gunther to get wise to what we were doing,” he said after they had gone more than five miles with no sign of pursuit. “It was bound to happen eventually. But we had to do what we did, Engel. Someone had to do it. And it just happened that I came along and dragged you into it.”

Engel did not reply. Kennedy wondered about the bitter thoughts the linguist must be thinking. He himself had reexerted the old agency mask; he was not thinking at all, not bothering to consider the inevitably drastic consequences of his wild rebellion pn Ganymede.

They fled on into the night. When he thought it was safe he changed the sled’s course and headed straight for the village. He was becoming an expert at traveling over the icebound plain.

“None of it would have started if you had kept your dictionary hidden away,” Kennedy said. “But you showed it to me, and I borrowed it, and I learned a couple of words of Ganny, and on a slim thread like that you’re washed up with the Corporation and I’m finished with the agency. But you know something, Engel? I’m not sorry at all. Not even if they catch us and take us back to Earth and publicly disembowel us. At least we stood on our hind legs and did something we thought was right.” He stopped to consider something. “You did think it was right, didn’t you? I mean, you didn’t help me in this thing just because I was twisting your arm? I hope you did it out of ethical reasons. It’s lousy enough to throw away your career in a single week, without having done it just because some other guy with ethics came along and made you do it.”

Engel still was silent. His silence began to irritate Kennedy.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Scared speechless? Did the fact that Gunther caught us throw you into such a blue funk you can’t talk?”

Still no answer. A cold worm of panic raced around the interior of Kennedy’s stomach, and he swiveled his neck to see if—

He was right.

One of Gunther’s final desperate shots had ripped a neat hole in Engel’s breathing-helmet. The bullet had entered on a sharp angle, puncturing the helmet just in front of the linguist’s nose, grazing his left cheekbone harmlessly —it left only a thin scratch—and passing out of the helmet below Engel’s left earlobe. That had been enough.

Engel’s air supply must have rushed out in one moist, foaming burst. Blood had dribbled from his mouth and ears as the internal suit-pressure dropped from the 14.7 psi of the suit to the much lower external pressure. Engel’s face was blotchy, purled, swollen, eyes bulging, thin lips drawn back in a contorted, grotesque smile.

He had died in a hurry. So fast that he had not even had time to grunt an anguished last cry into his open suit-microphone. And for half an hour Kennedy had ferried a corpse across the Ganymedean wastes, talked to him and chided him, and finally had lost his patience and his temper at the corpse’s continued obstinate silence.

Kennedy compressed his lips into a thin, bitter scowl. Engel had been so proud of bis dictionary, so anxious to show it off to the visitor from Earth. And a couple of weeks later that dictionary had worked his death, as surely as if it had been the bullet that sent his air-supply wailing out into the desolate night of Ganymede.

At least it had been a quick death, with no time for the man to languish in a prison somewhere and eternally curse the day Kennedy had come to Ganymede.

He stopped by a wide-stretching lake whose “waters” glittered in the light of three whirling moons. Only they and vast Jupiter seemed to be watching as Kennedy gently lifted Engel’s oddly light body from the sled and carried it to where the dark liquid lapped the edge of the ragged shore.

He waded out a foot or two into the lake and laid Engel face-down on the surface of the water. He drifted. Kennedy touched one gauntlet to the dead man’s boot and shoved, imparting enough force to send Engel floating slowly but inexorably out toward the middle of the lake.

To Kennedy’s horror the body remained afloat for some minutes, spinning in a lazy circle as the currents of the lake played games with it. Face down, arms and legs hovering on the crest of the lake, Engel looked like an effigy, a straw dummy put out to drift. But finally the methane came bubbling in through the two holes in his breathing-helmet, and the spacesuit lost its buoyancy and grew heavy, filling with liquid until Engel slowly and gravely vanished beneath the surface.

Kennedy remained there a moment in tribute. He had not known Engel at all; in the words of the Ganny poem, he was only a shadow of a man to Kennedy. The linguist had been a man without a past to him, just a face and a name and an ability to collect words and understand their meaning. Kennedy had not known how old Engel was, where he had been born or educated, whether or not he was married, where he lived when he was on Earth, what his hopes or aspirations were, his philosophy of life. And now no one of those things mattered. Engel had neither present nor future, and his past was irrelevant.

Kennedy remounted the sled and continued on. The time was 0412; he would reach the village at about 0445, and according to his schedule that was the time at which the Gannys would begin to stir into wakefulness after their last period of sleep. He rode silently on, not thinking, not making any plans.

He was still a mile from the village when he saw the Terran truck from the outpost, drawn up perhaps fifty or a hundred yards from the first houses of the village. He looked down on the scene from the row of razor-backed ridges that bordered the village on the south. When he was close enough, he could see clearly what was taking place.

The villagers were lined up outside their houses, and four dark spacesuited figures moved among them. An interrogation was under way. They were questioning the villagers about Engel and himself, hoping to find out where they were hiding.

As Kennedy watched, one of the spacesuited figures knocked a villager to the ground. The Ganny rose and stood patiently where he had stood before. Brutally the Earthman knocked him down again.

Kennedy’s jaws tightened. Gunther was prepared to stop at nothing in the attempt to find him. Maybe he would move on to wholesale destruction of the village, when no information was forthcoming.

With his chin he nudged the control of his suit-microphone and said, “Gunther?”

“Who’s that?”

“Kennedy. Hold your fire.”

“Where are you, Kennedy?”

“On the hill overlooking you. Don’t fire. I don’t intend to make trouble.”

He had no choice. He could not hide out on this frozen methane world for long, and the aliens, though they meant well, could not give him shelter, could not feed him. He would only be bringing pain and suffering to them if he tried to remain at large.

“What are you doing up there?” Gunther asked.

“I’m coming down. I’m surrendering. I don’t want to cause any more suffering. Got that? I’m surrendering. I’ll come down out of the hills with my hands up. Don’t hurt the villagers any more. They aren’t to blame.”

He rose from the shed and slowly made his way down the side of the hill, a dark figure against the whiteness. He was no more than halfway down when Gunther’s voice said sharply, “Wait a minute! You’re alone. Where’s Engel? If this is some sort of trick—”

“Engel’s dead. You killed him back at the airlock when we escaped, and I gave him burial in a lake back beyond the hills. I’m coming down alone. Hold your fire, Gunther.”