Invaders From Earth

17

Kennedy waited fifteen minutes after his brother left, went downstairs, and checked out. He knew the chase was on, now. They had called his brother. Probably they had called anyone in the hemisphere who knew him at all, and bullied them into refusing to give him aid.

He was on his own, now. And he would have to run.

Now that the hunt had begun, time was against him. He had to secure his evidence and present it to the U.N., and he had to do it before his pursuers found him. But how, when he was sought by the Corporation and the U.N.? He had no answer. But he knew doggedly he was going to try. He summoned up as much as he could remember of the Ganny poetry—the didactic philosophical poems on survival in a hostile environment. The Gannys knew what suffering meant. And they were tough, those peaceful, violence-hating aliens. Tougher than any Earthman.

It was dangerous for him to return to New York by any direct route. He decided to go overland, by bus perhaps, taking several weeks to do it. He let a mustache grow, and before he left Milwaukee he visited a barber; his long agency haircut gave way to a midwestern trim that left the back of his neck and his ears bare. That would make him just a little harder to recognize.

He discovered, with a little shock, that Watsinski, or whoever it was that was continuing the Ganymede colony hoax, had worked him into the framework.

He was wanted, said the telefaxes and newssheets, for having distributed arms to the Gannys. According to the ’fax he picked up in Chicago three days after leaving Milwaukee, he had been sent to Ganymede to do a series of magazine articles on the colony, but instead had treacherously murdered a member of the colony and had given ammunition to the aliens. Then, being sent back to Earth under arrest, he had escaped and was being sought for treason against humanity, with a fat reward for his capture.

He stared at the picture of himself in the telefax. It was an old shot, taken when he was twenty pounds heavier, wore his hair long, and had no mustache. The sleek, complacent face on the shiny yellow sheet bore little resemblance to his own.

He headed East, keeping himself inconspicuous and crossing streets to avoid Security men. He tried not to get into conversations with strangers. He kept to himself. He was the needle in the haystack of 225,000,000 people, and if he was lucky they might not find him.

As he moved on, he kept in touch with the news from Ganymede. The character of the bulletins had taken on a distinct new coloration.

Now there was word of sinister alien armies marching beyond the hills, of bomb detonations and the dry sound of target practice. “The aliens are becoming very resentful of our presence,” wrote Colony Director Lester Brookman in the syndicated column that appeared in the nation’s papers on August 11. “Undoubtedly they have been stirred up by the traitor Theodore Kennedy, who, I understand, is still at large on Earth. They object to our presence on their world and have several times made ugly threats. During the current crisis we do not permit members of the colony to leave the dome in groups of less than three.”

It was proceeding according to plan, Kennedy thought. The hostile aliens were on the warpath; soon they would be hunting for scalps; then would come the massacre. After that the troops would be called in to wipe out the belligerent savages. It was an old, old pattern of colonial expansion.

He knew the schedule. By September 17 the world would know that the colony of Earthmen was in imminent danger of being wiped out by the aliens, who refused to listen to reason and enter into peaceful negotiations. Five days of artful cliff-hanging would follow, and on September 22 the Corporation would make preliminary overtures toward the United Nations, asking for a police force to be sent to Ganymede to guard Terran interests. It would not be too strong a plea, for the public would need more manipulating. From September 22 through October 10 the world would pray for the endangered Earthmen; on October 11 the aliens would sweep down from the hills and virtually wipe out the gallant colony.

And, by October 17, United Nations troops would be on their way to Ganymede to quell the disturbance and police the world to make it safe for the Corporation.

Kennedy knew he had to act before October 11. After that, no amount of proof would seem convincing to a world determined to believe that a massacre had taken place.

But how could he get the evidence he needed?

He was in Trenton, New Jersey, eating lunch in a road-house, when the news came blaring forth: Ganymede Colony Attacked! The day was Sunday, September 17.

The cook reached over and turned up the radio behind the counter.

“A surprise alien attack shortly before dawn Ganymede time left the Earth colony on Jupiter’s moon in grave peril today,” came the announcer’s voice. “An estimated five thousand aliens, armed with clubs and native weapons, swept down on the dome that houses the colony, shouting ‘Death to the Earthmen!’ Colony Director Lester Brookman radioed later in the day that the assault had been beaten back, but only with the loss of three Earth lives and considerable damage to the colony.

“Names of the casualties and further developments will be brought to you as soon as they are released.”

A pale, pasty-faced woman eating further up along the counter exclaimed, “How horrible! Those poor people, fighting against those savages!”

“Couple of fellows were talking today that maybe the U.N.’s going to send troops up there to keep everything peaceful,” the cook said. “But they better hurry if they’re going to do it, or there’ll be a massacre.”

Kennedy frowned tightly, saying nothing, and wolfed his food. He wanted to tell them that their fears were for nothing, that there was no colony up there, that this whole alien attack had sprung full-blown from a public relations agency’s drawing board months before, and was neatly calculated to be revealed this day. That the fierce savages of Ganymede were actually wise and good and harmless people.

But he could not tell them these things.

He slipped into New York late that night and rented a room in Manhattan, in a dreary old slum of a hotel in the mid-sixties overlooking the East River. The name he gave was Victor Engel of Brockhurst, Wisconsin.

The hotel was populated by a curious sort of flotsam— desiccated leftovers from the last century, mostly, who remembered the days when Life Was Really Good. Kennedy, who had taken an intensive course in twentieth-century sociohistory as part of the requirements for his degree in Communications, smiled at the darkest era of the nerve-fraying Cold War of 1946-95, the five decades of agonizing psychological jousting that had led to the Maracaibo Pact and the lasting worldwide unity that had followed. It was as if the Depression of 1995 had wiped away their memories of childhood, taking away the threat of thermonuclear obliteration that had menaced these oldsters during their youth, leaving only a time-hazed remembrance of an Elysian era.

Well, that was their fantasy, Kennedy thought, and he would not puncture it. The Golden Age syndrome was a common accompaniment to senility, and at least they had the never-never world of their dreams to compensate for the bleakness of their declining days.

At least they had some form of happiness. And what do I do now? he asked himself.

He was in New York, but he was no closer to the solution of his problem than if he were still on Ganymede, or on Pluto. He had no access to the incriminating data on file at the agency. He could not simply publicly proclaim his accusations—who would believe the demented ravings of a murderer and a traitor? Time was growing short; in a few weeks, the attack would be made and the Gannys wiped out. And before long he would venture out on the street and be recognized, despite the changes he had made in his appearance.

On Wednesday he bought a newssheet and read it carefully. There was word from the beleaguered Ganymede colony, carefully fabricated by a Dinoli henchman. There was a notice to the effect that the traitor Theodore Kennedy was still at large, but that security authorities expected to apprehend him shortly.

And there was a little notice in the Personals column. Kennedy nearly overlooked it, but he read the column out of sheer boredom, hoping to find some diversion.

The notice said:

He read it through five or six times. He wondered if it might be a Security trap. No; of course not. It had to be from Marge. She was the one person on this entire world that he could trust.

He decided to go to her.