Lilith: A Snake in the Grass

Prologue Background to Trouble

The little man in the synthetic tweed jacket didn’t look like a bornb. In fact, he looked much the same as most of the other clerks, junior computer operators, and political men on the make in Military Systems Command. Two beady little brownish eyes set a bit too far apart by a hawk nose, a twitchy little mouth above a lantern jaw—the kind of nebhish nobody ever looked at twice. That’s why he was so dangerous.

He wore all the proper entry cards, and when handprints and retinal patterns were taken at doors that could trap or even destroy if the slightest thing was wrong he was passed without so much as an electronic pause. He carried a small briefcase, unusual only in that it was merely clasped and not chained to him or attached in some other way. Still, that caused no notice or alarm—it was probably tuned to his body, anyway.

Occasionally along brightly lit halls he’d meet another of his apparent ilk, and they’d pass, perhaps nodding as if they knew each other but more often simply ignoring one another as they would in a crowd or on any street corner. There was nothing exceptional about them, nothing to mark them as something apart from the common herd, because, except for their jobs and job location, there wasn’t any real difference. Except for this one little man. He was definitely exceptional, being a bornb.

Finally he reached a small room in which a single computer access element was placed in front of a comfortable-looking chair. There were no warning symbols, no huge guards or robot sentinels about, even though this particular room was the gateway to the military secrets of an interstellar empire of vast proportions. There was no need. No single individual could activate that access element; doing so required the combined and nearly simultaneous consent of three different human beings and two robot backups, each of whom received a different coded order from a different source. Any attempt to use it without the actions of all the others would result not only in a dead computer and blank terminal but also in a warning flashed to security.

The little man sat down in the chair, adjusted it for proper operating position, then leaned over and casually opened his briefcase. Removing a small crystalline device, he idly flicked it on with a thumb motion and then it set against the activation plate of the terminal.

The screen flickered, came to life. Printed on it were all the access codes as if it had received them and the question of whether the user preferred voice or CRT communication. There was no question of a print-out. Not with this computer.

“CRT only, please,” the little man idly said, in a thin, dry, nasal voice that bore no trace of accent. The machine waited. “Defensive files C-476-2377AX and J-392-7533DC, please, at speed.”

The computer seemed to blink at that last; at speed would be at roughly four hundred tines a second, the limit of the CRT to form the images in the first place. Nonetheless, the computer went to work. Both plans were delivered up and snapped past the little man in less than a second.

He was pleased. So much so that he decided then and there to press his luck a little and ask for more. “Run the master defense emergency plans, please, at speed, in order,” he told the machine casually.

The machine obeyed. Because of the volume of material it took almost four minutes.

The little man glanced at his watch. It was so tempting to continue, but every second he was here increased his chances of somebody just looking in or some random check. That wouldn’t do, not at all.

He placed his device back in his briefcase, snapped it closed, stood up, and walked out. At that point he made one minor mistake, one he would not be expected to know. You had to tell the damned thing to clear and reset the codes. If you didn’t, this computer didn’t react like all others and simply stay on—intolerable, with access to such secrets—or shut itself down. When it “saw” that the operator had left the room without resetting it, the machine advised control personnel of that fact, then locked in emergency shutdown until reset.

As the little man reached the first checkpoint door on his way out, things were already starting to crack around him.

The young woman glared for a moment at the red alert light that had flashed on her console. She ran a quick check to make sure there was no internal malfunction, then punched up the trouble—the Eyes Only Storage Computer.

Although she was one of those with part of the code that would activate the computer, she could not ask it any questions on its information storage from where she was—but she could get security information. She knew she had given no access so far today, so she punched two buttons and instructed, “Run tape last operation.”

The little man’s face showed clearly. Not only his face, but his retinal pattern, thermal pattern, everything about him that could be read by remote sensors and recorded. She brought in the rest of the computer net. “Identify!” she commanded.

“Threht, Augur Pen-Gyl, OG-6, Logistics,” came the computer’s reply.

Before her hand could hit the alarm it had already been hit by two of her associates.

No alarms sounded, no flashing lights and whistling bells that would panic or tip off a spy. Instead, as Threht reached the third and last security door, peered into the oculator, and pressed his palm on the identiplate, it simply refused to open.

He realized at once that security, both human and robotic, was already closing in on him from all sides, and decided in a flash that the least security would be on the other side of the door. He raised his left hand, paused for a moment, frozen, as if marshaling all he had, then struck the door near its locking mechanism. The area buckled, and he leaned forward and without seeming effort pushed until the door slid back enough for him to squeeze through.

Once he was inside, the door slammed shut behind him, and he could hear the secondary seals slide into place. It formed an effective trap, between the inner and outer door. The chamber itself was airtight; so if someone got this far, the air inside the chamber could be rapidly withdrawn. No chances, not with somebody this good.

The vacuum hardly bothered him. He kicked at the outer door once, twice; on the third try, it gave. He leaned forward with all his might, opening a crack and holding the door open against the massive inrush of air until the pressure equalized. At that point he threw it open and strode through into the main entrance hall.

His guess had been correct; security forces were only now reaching the hall area, and stunned personnel throughout the hall prevented a quick shot. Four sleek black security robots sped toward him. Apparently unafraid, he let them advance. Then, just before they reached him, he suddenly ran right at the two in the lead, pushing one into the other and spilling both to the floor. The scene was incredible: a tiny, ordinary-looking fellow tumbled four tons of animated metal without so much as recoiling.

He moved quickly now, directly for the clear windows at the front of the hall. He moved with such tremendous speed, speed beyond human and most robots, that when he reached the windows he leaped straight into them. The panes were tremendously thick, able to resist even conventional bornbs hurled against them, but they cracked and shattered like ordinary glass as he sailed through; he then dropped the twelve meters to the ground, landing on his feet with perfect balance, and started to run across the broad courtyard.

By then he had lost the element of surprise. Realizing from the point at which he’d battered in the first door that they were dealing with some clever sort of robot, the security forces had assumed the worst and were ready for him with killer robots, human troops, even a small laser cannon.

He stopped in the center of the grassy knoll and looked around, sizing up the situation but appearing cool and efficient. Then, suddenly, turning to look at the massive amounts of firepower trained on him, he grinned; the grin became a laugh, a laugh that rose in pitch until it became eerie, inhuman, maniacal, echoing back from the building’s walls.

The order was given to open fire, but as the beams tore into the spot on which he stood he just wasn’t there any more. He was going up, rising into the air silently and effortlessly at a tremendous rate of speed.

Automatic weapons tried to follow him but couldn’t match his rate of climb. One officer stared up into the empty sky, laser pistol drawn. “The thing that pisses me off most is that he didn’t even tear his pants.”

Control shifted instantly to Orbital Command, but they weren’t prepared for the suddenness of the little man’s departure, nor could they be certain of how high he would rise or to where. Thirty-seven commercial and sixty-four military ships were in orbit at that point, plus over eight thousand satellites of one sort or another—not to mention the five space stations. Sophisticated radar would spot him if he changed course or attitude and decided to land elsewhere on the planet, but while he remained in space they would have to wait until he did something to draw their attention. There were simply too many things in orbit, and he was too small to track unless first spotted so they could lock onto him.

So they waited patiently, ready to shoot the hell out of any ship that made a break for it or simply decided to change position. And they closely monitored each ship; should someone try to board from space they’d know it.

The robot played the waiting game for almost three full days. By then its primary mission was a total failure—the plans it had stolen were now known, so quite obviously obsolete at that point—but what it had stolen was of some value, since they revealed strengths and current positions, and when analyzed by a specialist in military affairs would show a prospective enemy how the thinking of the Military Command and its bosses ran. Still, it couldn’t wait forever —the force positions could not be so easily or quickly changed, and any contingency plan for their dispersion must be a variation of the original. For the present, their range of options was narrowed, but the options would increase geometrically with each elapsed hour. The robot had to make its move, and it did.

A small planetary satellite officially on the records as an obsolete weather-control monitor station came within three thousand meters of a small corvette. The ship, a government courier boat, would ordinarily be unmanned while keeping station, but no ships were left unguarded at this point.

The robot, still looking like the perfect clerk, emerged from the satellite through a hatch that should not have been there. But, then, the satellite was only superficially what it appeared to be, having long ago. been copied and replaced with something infinitely more useful.

With seeming effortlessness, the robot sped to the corvette and stuck to the outer hull. It reached to its belt and pulled off a small weapon whose dangling line it attached to a small terminal that was otherwise invisible under its left arm. The robot had spent the past three days drawing enormous energy reserves to itself with the devices in the satellite; now, at capacity, it discharged through the weapon. A strong beam emerged from the thing, quickly cutting a hole the size of an orange in the corvette’s hull. It had chosen its spot well: there were only two guards, one human and one robot, on the ship, and both were in the compartment directly under the point at which the beam went through the elaborate triple hull and into the opening. No one would ever know if it Was decompression or the beam that killed the unlucky human guard; the robot, obviously, was shorted out by the sudden dispersion of energy within the compartment The enemy robot then tripped the airlock in the forward compartment and entered effortlessly, finding no apparent alarms and no opposition. The instant acceleration from a standing start would have killed any living thing on board.

The young man sat in absorbed silence, listening to the taped narrative. He was in much the same mold as most of his fellow humans at this point in human history, the perfection of the physical body. From the viewpoint of earlier times he was almost a superman; genetic engineering had made that possible. But every man and woman these days was at this peak of perfection, so among his fellow humans he was merely average-looking, somewhere around thirty with jet-black hair and reddish-brown eyes, at the legal norm height of 180 centimeters, and the. legal norm weight of 82 kilograms. But he was neither average nor normal in more than one specific area, and that was why he was here.

He looked over at Commander Krega as the narrative stopped at the fleeing ship. “You had all the available ships under close watch and trace, of course?” It wasn’t a question, merely a statement of fact.

Krega, an older version of the norm himself in whom the experience of an additional forty years’ service showed on his face and particularly in his eyes, nodded. “Of course, But merely to have destroyed the thing at that point, when he’d already come so far and done so much, would have been a waste. We simply placed a series of tracers on everything that could conceivably move in orbit and waited for him … it … whatever. It was just a robot, after all, albeit a striking one. We had to know whose. At least who it worked for. You know something about subspace ballistics, I take it?”

“Enough,” the younger man admitted.

“Well, once we had his angle and speed—and what speed from a standing start!—we knew where he’d have to, come out. Fortunately, tightbeams can outrun any physical object, so we had someone in the area when he emerged a few subjective minutes later. Close enough, anyway, to get his next set of readings. That much, wasn’t difficult. He made seven blind switches, just to try to throw us off the track, but we never lost him. We were able to move in within a few minutes of the point in time at which he began transmitting the data—a safeguard just in case we were as efficient as we actually are. We closed in immediately then, though, and fried him and the ship to atoms. No other way around it. We’d seen firsthand just some of the things that baby could do.”

The younger man shook his head. “Pity, though. It would have been interesting to disassemble the thing. It’s certainly not any design I know of.”

The commander nodded. “Or any of us, either. The fact is, the thing was just about at the limits of our own technology, if not a bit beyond. It fooled x-ray scanners, retinal scanners, body heat and function sensors—you name it. It even fooled the friends of the poor civil servant it was pretending to be, implying memory and possibly personality transfer. At any rate, even though its clever little orbital base blew up after it departed, there was enough left to piece together some of its insides—and I’ll tell you, it’s not ours. Not anything close. Oh, you can deduce some of the functions and the like, but even where the function is obvious, it isn’t done the way we’d do it, nor are the materials similar to ours. We have to face the ugly fact that the robot and its base were built, designed, and directed by an alien power of which we are totally ignorant”

The young man showed mild interest. “But surely you know something about it now?”

The commander shook his head sadly. “No, we don’t. We know more than we did, certainly, but not nearly enough. These bastards are wickedly clever. But I’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s first look at what we do know, or can deduce, about our enemy.” He turned in his desk chair and punched a button. A blank wall bunked and became a visor screen showing an enormous collection of stars, thousands of which blazed a reddish color.

“The Confederacy,” the commander stated needlessly. “Seven thousand six hundred and forty-six worlds, by last count, over a third of a galaxy. Quite an accomplishment for a race from a single planet out there on that one little arm. Planets terraformed, planets where the people were adapted to the place, even planets with sixty other intelligent native life forms on them, all now nicely acculturated to our way of doing things. We own it, we run it our way, and we’ve always had our own way. Not a single one of those other races was ever in any position to challenge, us. They had to accept us and our way, or they died in much the manner our own native world was pacified so many centuries ago. We’re the boss.”

The young man didn’t respond. He felt no need to. Born and raised in this culture, he simply took what Krega was saying for granted, as did everyone else.

“Well, we’ve now met our technological equals, perhaps even slight technological superiors,” the commander continued. “Analysis made the obvious deductions. First, we’re always expanding. Obviously there is another dominant race and culture doing the same from some other point in the galaxy. They discovered us before we discovered them—bad luck for us. They scouted, probed, and analyzed us, and came up with several facts. Second, our ultimate collision is unavoidable. We’re starting to compete for the same space. Third, they are probably smaller than we, numerically weaker, as it were, but with a slight technological edge. They assume war, but they are not certain they could win it. If they had been sure they’d have attacked by now. That means they need information—lots of it. How our military organization is set up. How our defenses are established and would be used. And most important, how we think. A total understanding of us while we remained in ignorance of their ways would give them and their war machines a tremendous edge, assuming equal firepower. Fourth, they’ve been at this for some time, which means our collision is still way off, perhaps years. Finding us was probably accidental, some scout of theirs who got overextended, lost, or just overly ambitious. They’ve been around long enough, though, to make robots that pass for humans, to put spy stations in orbit around Military Systems Command, of all things, and to work out a deal with some of our own to help sell us out.”

The young man suddenly looked interested. “Ah,” he breathed.

“Exactly,” the commander grumbled. “The last deduction is that they themselves are physically so alien to us that there is simply no way in hell they could move among us undetected, no physical disguise even possible. That leaves human-mimicking robots—-who knows how many? I’m getting so I suspect my own staff—and human traitors. That last becomes the province of this office, naturally.”

In earlier times the Operational Security Office might have been referred to as a secret police, which it most certainly was. Unlike the earlier models, though, it had little to do with the day-to-day life of the citizenry in the specific sense. Its mandate was broader, more generalized.

Mankind had perfected a formula long ago, one that worked. It was neither free in a libertarian sense nor in a personal sense, but it was efficient and it worked—not just for one world but for every world, across an interstellar empire so vast that only total cultural control could keep it together. The same system everywhere. The same ideas and ideals, the same values, the same ways of thinking about things—everywhere. Flexible, adaptable to different biomes and even, with some wrenching adjustments made mercilessly, adaptable to alien cultures and life forms.

The formula was all-pervasive, an equalizing force in the extreme, yet it provided some play for different conditions and a measure of social mobility based on talent and ability.

There were of course populations that could not or would not adapt. In some instances, they could be “re-educated” by means of the most sophisticated techniques, but in others they could not. These were not merely alien worlds where the formula simply couldn’t be tried because of their very alienness—those were ruthlessly exterminated as a last resort Every system also bred individuals who could circumvent it and had the will and knack of doing so. Such people could be extremely dangerous and had to be hunted down and either captured for re-education or killed outright.

“In the early days, however, the powers that be were much softer on those who couldn’t otherwise be dealt with,” Commander Krega told him. “They had not yet reached the absolute perfection of our present system. The result was permanent exile in the Warden Diamond, as you know. We still send a few there—the ones with particular talents and abilities we need or those who show potential for some great discovery. It’s paid off, too, that policy, although we ship barely a hundred a year out there now.”

The young man felt a nervous twinge in his stomach. “So that’s where your alien race went for help. That’s where your robot fled—the Warden Diamond.”

“You got it,” Krega agreed.

In a galaxy whose system was based on perfect order, uniformity, harmony, and a firm belief in natural laws, the Warden Diamond was an insane asylum. It seemed to exist as a natural counterpoint to everyplace else, the opposite of everything the rest of the Confederacy was or even believed in.

Halden Warden, a scout for the Confederacy, had discovered the system, nearly two hundred years earlier, when the Diamond was far outside the administrative area of the Confederacy. Warden was something of a legend among scouts, a man who disliked most everything about civilization, not the least other people. Such extreme antisocial tendencies would have been dealt with in the normal course of events, but there was an entire discipline of psychology devoted to discovering and developing antisocial traits that could benefit society. The fact was, only people with personalities like Warden’s could stand the solitude, the years without companionship, the physical and mental hardships of deep-space scouting. No sane person in Confederation society, up to Confederation standards, would ever take a job like that.

Warden was worse than most.’ He spent as little time as possible in “civilization,” often just long enough to refuel and reprovision. He flew farther, longer, and more often than any other scout before or since, and his discoveries were astonishing in their number alone.

Unfortunately for his bosses back in the Confederacy, Warden felt that discovery was his only purpose. He left just about everything else, including preliminary surveys and reports, to those who would use his beamed coordinates to follow nun. Not that he didn’t make the surveys—he just communicated as little with the Confederacy as possible, often in infuriating ways.

Thus, when the signal “4AW” came in, there was enormous excitement and anticipation—four human-habitable planets in one system! Such a phenomenon was simply unheard of, beyond all statistical probabilities, particularly considering that only one in four thousand solar systems contained anything remotely of use. They waited anxiously for the laconic scout to tell them what he would name the new worlds and to give his preliminary survey descriptions of them, waited anxiously not only in anticipation of a great discovery, but also with trepidation at just what Crazy Warden would say and whether or not his message could be deciphered.

And then came the details, confirming their worst fears. He followed form, though, closest in to farthest out from the sun.

“Charon,” came the first report. “Looks like Hell.

“Lilith,” he continued. “Anything that pretty’s got to have a snake in it.

“Cerberus,” he named the third. “Looks like a real dog.”

And finally, “Medusa: Anybody who lives here would have to have rocks in his head.”

The coordinates followed, along with a code confirming that Warden had done remote, not direct, exploration—that is, he hadn’t landed, something that was always his option—and a final code, “ZZ,” which filled the Confederacy with apprehension. It meant that there was something very odd about the place, so approach with extreme caution.

Cursing Crazy Warden for giving them nothing at all to go on, they mounted the standard maximum-caution expedition—a full-scale scientific expedition, with two hundred of the best, most experienced Exploiter Team members aboard, backed up by four heavy cruisers armed to the teeth.

The big trouble with Warden’s descriptions was that they were almost always right—only you never figured out quite what he meant until you got there. Appearing out of hyperspace, the follow-up party gazed upon a.strange sight—a hot, F-type star, with a huge solar system containing ringed gas giants, huge asteroids, and numerous solid planets. But in the midst of it, close to the sun, were four worlds with abundant oxygen, nitrogen, and water, four jewels that screamed “life.” Although the four planets were in far different orbits—from a little more than 158 million kilometers from their sun to 308 million kilometers out—when the party first encountered them, they were in a rare configuration. For a brief period, the four were at almost exact right angles to one another. Although that configuration was a fluke and, rarely observed since, the system’s four worlds became known as the Warden Diamond. And diamonds they were despite the orbital coincidence at then” discovery —sparkling gems with potential untold riches.

Still, even some of the most materialistic among the observers took the diamond configuration as some sort of omen, just as Warden himself might have. And so, like Warden, they didn’t land immediately. They poked and they probed and they analyzed, but found nothing at all suspicious. There was no evidence of supernatural meddlings here, despite the incredible impossibility of four worlds so closely matched to permit life. So they laughed at themselves for their foolishness, their superstition, their sudden infusion with primitive fears they all believed themselves well beyond, and they relaxed a little. Some suspected that the Warden Diamond was the result of some ancient civilization terraforming to suit—but if it was, there ;Was no sign of that now.

They moved cautiously in on the planets. Charon was hot and steamy, closest of the four to the sun. It rained much of the time there, and the small, nasty dinosaur-like saurians that lived there seemed formidable, perhaps even dangerous—but not unmanageable. There might be more dangerous stuff in the seas that covered much of the world, but only a permanent expedition could find that out. In the meantime, this jungle world, with an axial tilt of under 6 degrees, had a temperature range of from roughly 28 to 60 degrees centigrade. Thanks to the land distribution it was habitable and usable—but not inviting.

Charon did indeed look like Hell.

Next out was Lilith, almost a textbook perfect world. Slightly smaller than Charon, it was roughly 70 percent water but far more temperate and far gentler in its landscape. Mountains were low, and there were broad plains and swamps. A nice variety of landforms without serious extremes or violence, and an axial tilt of 84 degrees—almost a world on its side, which meant little seasonal variation. It was very hot all over, with days of 40 degrees centigrade or more, with 20 to 25 considered absolutely frigid.

Its jungle like forests were the most verdant green, and though the foliage was alien, it wasn’t all that alien, bearing large amounts of fruits and other products that proved edible by humans. The dominant animal life was apparently exclusively insects, from giant behemoths down to tiny creatures smaller than the head of a pin. It was the kind of world Confederacy terraformers aimed for and rarely achieved artificially; now, here it was, apparently natural, the beautiful Eden like paradise of Lilith. And not a snake in sight—yet.

Cerberus was harsher. Its 25-degree axial tilt gave it extreme seasonal variations, that ranged from its frozen polar caps to a hot 40-degree Centigrade at the equator. The oddest thing about Cerberus was its land surface, which appeared almost covered with enormous varicolored forests. It took the actual landing to discover that Cerberus in fact had no land area at all, but was almost covered by enormous plants growing up from the ocean bottom, some many kilometers, so tremendously dense in many places that they formed an almost solid surface. On the tops of these great waterlogged forests whole new varieties of plants grew, forming a unique botanical ecosystem. The visible wildlife seemed to be birdlike in appearance, although there were some insects as well, but animal life was sparse on Cerberus, it seemed—unless it lay beneath the omnipresent waters of the surface. Still, so dense and enormous were the plants of this water world that men could live there, perhaps even build cities in the trees—an alien but not impossible world. With no apparent natural resources beyond wood and no way to bring in a truly modern lifestyle, settlement there would be precarious. Inhabitable, yes, but from the standpoint of modern man it was something of a dog.

Last and least pleasant of all was Medusa, a planet with frozen seas, blinding snow, and jagged, towering peaks. Its 19-degree axial tilt gave it seasons, all right, but it was a bad to worse situation, with summer in the tropics averaging 20 degrees centigrade or less and going to the impossibly cold polar regions. Although in heavy glaciation, it was the only one of the four Warden worlds with signs of volcanic activity. There were some forests, but mostly tundra and grasslands, although it had what appeared to be mainmalian life in the form of herds of odd grazing animals and some very fierce and nasty carnivores. It was a harsh, brutal world that could be tamed and lived on; still, the Exploiter Team had to agree with Warden—to want to go and live there, you’d have to have rocks in your head.

Four worlds, from a steaming hell to frozen tundra. Four worlds with temperature extremes that could be borne and air and water that could be used. It was incredible, fantastic—and true. And so the Exploiter Team went in, set up its main base just off a tropical lagoon out of the most romantic travel poster—on Lilith, of course. Smaller expeditions went from there to the other three worlds for preliminary testing, poking, and probing.

Warden had been right about three of them, but his suspicion of Lilith seemed to be just the natural suspicion of somebody who sees something too good to be true. Or perhaps it was some sixth sense, developed from so many years in isolation and poking and probing into so many alien systems. Perhaps it was…

Once down, the Exploiter Teams were in effective quarantine from the military and from all commerce with the Confederacy. The initial exploration would take at least a year, during which they would be both scientists and guinea pigs, poking and probing one another as much as they poked and probed each planet. They had shuttlecraft capable of traveling between the planets if necessary and ground and air transportation to carry on their own work, but nothing interstellar. The risk was too great. Man had been burned too many times before to take such chances.

It took Lilith’s snake about six months to size up the newcomers.

By the time all their machinery ceased to function it was already too late. They watched first as all the power drained out of the machinery and equipment as if being drunk by an eager child. Within forty-eight hours the machinery, the equipment—in fact, all artifacts—started to break up into so much junk. Four died as a result, and the rest watched in helpless horror as their corpses, too, rapidly began to decompose.

Within a week there was simply no sign that anything alien had ever landed. Cleared places seemed to grow over almost overnight; metal, plastics, organic and inorganic compounds—everything rotted, dissolved, and eventually was nothing more than a fine powder, quickly absorbed by the rich soil. There was nothing left—nothing but sixty-two stunned, stark-naked scientists both bewildered and scared, without even the most rudimentary instruments to help explain what the hell had happened to them.

Just a week earlier direct contact between the parties on the four planets had been resumed. A small group from each of the other three worlds had come to Lilith to share their findings and decide what to do next. They had come, talked, analyzed, filed preliminary reports with the guardian cruiser still in space nearby, then returned to their own planets, unknowingly taking with them the snake.

The science section on the cruiser immediately jumped on the problem. And with remote robot-controlled labs they finally found the one thing everybody but Warden’s sixth sense had missed. The snake was an alien organism, microscopic beyond belief and acting in colonies within the cells. It was not intelligent in the sense that it possessed anything humans would recognize as thought processes, but it did seem to have an amazing set of rules it enforced on an entire planet and an incredible capacity for adjusting to new conditions and bringing them to heel. Though its life span was a sparse three to five minutes, somehow this micro-organism operated at a time rate hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times faster than anything around it. On Lilith, it still had taken the organism six months to adapt to these new things that had been introduced to its world, and it had finally evolved enough to adapt the aliens to its comfortable, symbiotic system.

But the other planets were different—different atmospheric balances, different gravity, different radiation intensities, all sorts of great differences. It could not adapt such alien environments to its system, so it adapted to them instead. In some cases—Medusa, for one—it adapted the host organism, the people, and quickly, the animals and plants. On Charon and Cerberus it struck a balance in the hosts that was to its liking; this produced by-products of physical change not relevant to it but rather resulting from where, in those bodies, it was most comfortable.

The Warden Diamond was, sadly, quarantined while scientists looked for a cure. Removing some of the unlucky victims in isolation chambers did not work: something linked the organisms to the Diamond, and they died when removed from the system, killing their hosts in the process, since the organisms resided in the hosts’ cells and took over, really, rearranging things to suit themselves. Without their managers, the cells rapidly went berserk, causing an ugly and painful, although mercifully swift, death.

Oddly, those on one of the planets could still move in-system to the others, the organism having mutated so much inside them that it no longer even recognized Lilith as its home and, having struck a comfortable balance, having no further reason to change.

Humans could live and work and build on the Warden Diamond, but once there they could never leave.

That did not stop the scientists, of course, and they came and set up their colonies, although doing so was difficult on Lilith, where nothing not native to the planet seemed to be allowed. They came prepared and they came to study and uncover the secrets of the Warden Diamond. After two centuries their descendants were still at it, joined occasionally by others—but very little progress had been made. The planets, the organism, even the changes defied them. That only spurred them on all the more.

But it wasn’t the scientists who were to settle the Diamond, but the antisocials. Early on, when the magnitude of the problem was realized, came the idea of setting up the four worlds as the perfect prison.

The misfits were sent there in droves—all those whose connections could avoid the psych boys, who had genius or some sort of talent that would be destroyed by re-education, political prisoners from countless worlds—all sent there rather than killed or mentally altered in the hope that some future successful rival would remember they didn’t kill or psych the deposed but exiled them. Male, female, it didn’t matter. The best antisocials, the political-criminal elite. And there they lived and bore their children and died, and their children lived and bore their children, and so on.

So these worlds were run, dominated in fact, by a criminal elite imprisoned forever and with little love for or feeling of kinship with the masses of the Confederacy. Nonetheless, they had commerce. The organism could be killed, sterilized out, in a complex process, on unmanned ships. So other criminal geniuses, those not yet caught or in charge of governments, could establish caches of money, jewelry, precious art, and stolen goods of all types on the Warden worlds with no fear that the Confederacy could touch them.

At the same time the strongest, the smartest, the most ruthless of the exiles clawed their ways to the top of these four strange worlds, until they controlled them and their own trade. Lilith, where nothing physical could be stored, was the perfect place for storing such information as special bank account numbers, official secrets even the Confederacy had to be kept ignorant of, things of that sort—the kind of information one never put into a computer because all computers are vulnerable to a genius technician. No matter how foolproof the machine, the foolproof system was devised by someone and could therefore be broken by someone else.

So these great criminal kings—the Four Lords of the Diamond, alien now from their -ancestral race, geniuses all yet bitterly exiled nonetheless—had the secrets, the stolen goods, the blackmail of the Confederacy, and their influence extended throughout the Confederacy even though they were forever barred from seeing it.

“Then the Four Lords are selling us out,” the young man sighed. “Why not simply destroy all four worlds? Good riddance anyway, I’d say.”

“So would I,” Commander Krega agreed. “Only we can’t. We let them go on too long—they’re politically invulnerable. Too much wealth, too much power, too many secrets are there. There is simply no way to get them any more—they have the goods on just about anybody who would be high up enough to make those decisions.”

The young man cleared his throat. “I see,” he responded a little disgustedly. “So why not place agents on those worlds? Find out what’s what?”

“Oh, that was tried from the first,” Krega told him. “It didn’t work, either. Consider—we’re asking someone to exile himself permanently and allow himself to be turned, equally permanently, into something not quite human. Only a fanatic would agree to that—and fanatics make notoriously poor spies. The Four Lords are also not exactly easy marks, you know. They keep track of who’s coming in, and their own contacts here tell them just about everything they want to know about any newcomers. We might sneak one agent, one really good agent, in on them—but a lot? Never. They’d quickly catch on and just kill the lot, innocent and guilty alike. They also are supremely confident of human psychology—the agent is going to have to be damned good to get away with such an assignment. Anybody with that much on the ball is also going to realize that he is trapped there and that he’ll have to live there, on the Four Lords’ worlds, until he dies. Loyalty conies hard, but even the most loyal and committed agent is going to have the brains to see which side his future bread will be buttered on. So he switches sides. One of the current Lords is in fact a Confederacy agent.”

“Huh?”

Krega nodded. “Or was, I should say. Probably the best infiltrator in the business, knew all the his and outs, and found the Diamond not threatening but fascinating. The Confederacy bored him, he said. We dropped him on Lilith just to worm his way into the hierarchy—and he sure did. In spades. Only we received almost no information from him while feeding him a great deal—and now he’s one of the enemy. See what I mean?”

“You have a tough problem,” the young man sympathized. “You don’t have any reliable people on the Warden worlds, and anybody capable of doing what has to be done winds up on the other side. And now they’re selling us out to an alien force.”

“Exactly.” Krega nodded. “You see where this puts us. Now, of course, we do have some people down there. None are a hundred percent reliable, and an of them would slit your throat in an instant if doing so was in their best interests. But we find occasional inducements—small payoffs of one sort or another, even a little blackmail on ones with close relatives back in the Confederacy—that give us a little edge. A little, but not much, since the Four Lords are pretty ruthless when it comes to what they perceive as treason. Our only advantage is that the worlds are still fairly new to us and so therefore relatively sparsely settled. There is no totalitarian control on any of them, and there are different systems and hierarchies on each.”

The young man nodded. “I have the uneasy feeling that you are leading up to something—but I must remind you of what you told me about past agents, and also that, even kicking and screaming, I’d be but one man on one world.”

Commander Krega grinned. “No, it’s not quite like that at all. You’re a damned good detective and you know it. You’ve tracked down and upset rocks in places nobody else looked at twice; out-maneuvered and outguessed sophisticated computers and some of the best criminal minds ever known, even though you are still quite young. You are the youngest person with the rank of Inspector in the history of the Confederacy. We have two different problems here. One, we must identify this alien force and trace it back to its origin. We must find out who they are and where they are and what their intentions are. Even now it may be too late, but we must act as if it were not. Two, we must neutralize their information conduit, the Four Lords. How would you do it?”

The young man smiled thoughtfully. “Pay the Four Lords more than the aliens do,” he suggested hopefully. “Put ’em to work for us.”

“Impossible. We already thought of that,” the commander responded glumly. “It’s not profit—they have more than they need. And it’s not power—that, too, they have in abundance. But we have cut them off forever from the rest of the universe, trapped them there. Before, they could do nothing—but now, with an alien force as then* ally, they can. I’m afraid such people are motivated by revenge, and that we cannot give them. We can’t even commute their sentence, short of a scientific breakthrough—and nobody has more people working on that angle than they do. No, making a deal is out. We have no cards.”

“Then you need somebody good down there on each world, looking for clues to the aliens. There has to be some sort of direct contact: they have to get their information out and their little play-toys, like that fancy robot, programmed and in. An agent might turn traitor, but if he was a volunteer he wouldn’t be motivated by revenge and would sure as hell feel closer to humanity than to some aliens of unknown appearance and design.”

“Agreed. And it would have to be the very best for all four. Someone who could survive, even prosper under their conditions while having the ability to collect enough data and get it out. But how do we buy the time we also need?”

The young man grinned. “Easy. At least easy to say—maybe nearly impossible to do. You kill all four Lords. Others would take their places, of course, but in the interim you’d buy months, maybe years.”

“That was our thinking,” Krega agreed. “And so we ran it through the computers. Master detective, loyal, willing to volunteer, and with an Assassin’s License. Four needed, plus a coordinator, since they all would have to be put to work simultaneously and would obviously have no likely reason or means to contact one another. Plus for insurance, of course, spares that could be sent in if something happened to one or more of the originals. We fed in all these attributes and requirements and out you popped.”

The young man chuckled dryly. “I’ll bet Me and who else?”

“Nobody else. Just you.”

For the first time the man looked puzzled. He frowned. “Just me?”

“Oh, lots of secondaries, but they were slightly less reliable for one reason or another, or slightly weaker in one or another way, or, frankly, were engaged on other vital business or located halfway around the Confederacy.”

“Then you’ve got two problems,” the young man told Krega. “First, you have to figure out how the hell I’d volunteer willingly for an assignment like this, and, second, how you’re going to make…” His voice trailed off and he suddenly sat up straight. “I think I see…”

“I thought you would.” Krega sounded satisfied and confident. “It’s probably the most guarded secret in the Confederacy, but the Merton Process works now. Almost a hundred percent.”

The other nodded absently, thinking about it. When he’d received his promotion to Inspector over a year ago, they’d taken him into an elaborate and somewhat mystifying laboratory and put him into some sort of hypnotic state. He was never quite sure what they had done, but he’d had a headache for three days and that had aroused his curiosity. The Merton Process. The key to immortality, some said. It had taken a hell of a lot of spare-time detective work to come even that close to it, and all he’d been able to determine in the end was that the Confederacy was working on a process wherein the entire memory, the entire personality, of an individual could be taken, stored in some way, and then imprinted on another brain, perhaps a clone brain. He had also learned that every time it had been tried, the new body either had become hopelessly insane or had died. He said as much.

“That used to be the case,” Krega agreed, “but no more. The clone brains just couldn’t take it. Raised in tanks, they had developed different brain patterns for the autonomic functions, and those were always disrupted in the transfer. Still, we had been able to remove all the conscious part of the brain from someone and then put it back just the way it was in the original body while also keeping the original information on file. That led, of course, to trying it with other bodies —remove the cerebral part, as it were, just like erasing a recording, then put someone else’s personality and memories in there. It’s a ticklish business—only works once in a while, when loads of factors I don’t understand very well, and maybe Merton doesn’t either, match. The new body has to be at least two years younger than the original, for example. On the other hand, some important factors like sex or planetary origin seem to be irrelevant. Still, we get a perfect transfer about one in twenty times.”

He stirred uneasily. “What happens to the other nineteen?”

Krega shrugged. “They die, or are nuts and have to be destroyed. We use only minor antisocials anyway, those who would have to be psyched and programmed or simply eliminated. We took your print fourteen months ago—you must know that. Now we can make four of you. Different bodies, of course, but you inside in every single detail. More than four, if necessary. We can drop you on all four planets simultaneously, complete with criminal record and past history. We can drop you on all four and still keep you here, as you are, to correlate the data from the others.”

The young man said nothing for almost a minute, then: “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Four times damned, yet also not damned at all,” the commander came back. “So you see, there’s no risk. We already have your imprint.”

He considered the facts. “Still, there’d have to be a more recent one,” he noted. “It wouldn’t do to have four of me wake up en route to the Warden Diamond in different bodies with no knowledge of the last fourteen months, not to mention this conversation.”

Krega nodded. “You’re right, of course. But I have mine updated annually, anyway. Except for the headache, if the process worked the first time it’ll work ever after.”

“That’s reassuring,” the man replied uncomfortably, considering that they had done it to him without his knowledge before—and the commander’s words implied that sometimes it didn’t work. Dismissing that idea from his mind, he asked, “But how do I get the data to correlate? Even supposing that these four versions of me are able to ferret out everything you want to know—how do / know it?”

Krega reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a small box. He opened it gingerly and pushed it over to the young man. “With this,” he said flatly.

The man looked at the object. “This” turned out to be a tiny little bead of unknown substance so small it could hardly be seen with the naked eye even in its black velveteen setting.

“A tracer implant?” The young man was sceptical. “What good does that do us?” The device was familiar to all cops; it could be implanted anywhere on a body with no chance of detection and with no operation necessary. Once in place, someone could follow its signal to just about anywhere—a common police tool.

“Not a tracer,” the commander told him. “Based on it, 111 admit, but more a by-product of the Merton researches. It is implanted directly into a specific point in the brain—I’m sorry I don’t have enough technical biology to explain further. You’ll get one, too. It only works when two bodies have exactly the same brain pattern; otherwise you get gibberish. Using the tracer part, a special receiver can locate the wearer anywhere on a planet, then lock onto him, receive, and enonnously amplify what it receives, which then is fed to a Merton recorder. From that another imprint can be made, a ‘soft’ one, that win give its matched mate a record of just what happened after the new body awoke until we took the readout It’s soft—they tell me the sensation is kind of like! seeing a movie all at once. But it’s a record of everything your counterpart said and did. We’ll put you on a guard picket ship, very comfortable, and take almost continuous soft imprints using monitor satellites. You’ll have your information, all right. And the thing’s actually a quasi-organic substance, so even on Lilith, which hates everything alien, it will continue to function as part of the body. We know. We have a couple of people with tracers down there now—they don’t know it, of course. Just a test. Works fine.”

The young man nodded. “You seem to have thought of everything.” He paused a moment. “And what if I refuse after all this? Or to put it another way, what if I say to go ahead and my, ah, alter egos decide once down there not to cooperate?”

Krega grinned evilly. “Consider what I’m offering. We have the capacity to make you immortal—if you succeed. If you succeed, no reward would be high enough. You are an atheist. You know that when you go, you go forever—unless you succeed. Then you, and because of the soft imprints, your alter egos as well will continue to exist. Continue to live on. I think that is quite an inducement.”

The young man looked thoughtful. “I wonder if they will see it that way?” he mused, only half aloud.

Four Lords of the Diamond, pour enormously powerful, clever people to kill. Four keys to an enigma that could spell the end of humanity. Five problems, five puzzles.

Krega didn’t really have to offer a reward. The assignment was irresistible.

The base ship was seven kilometers long. It floated there off the Warden system, about a quarter of a light-year from the sun. Designed as a floating base, almost a mini-world, the ship was completely self-contained, and were it not for the feeling of isolation all around, a pretty comfortable duty.

From its lower decks sped the picket ships: one-man or often totally automated vessels that encircled the Warden system and kept the base ship in constant touch with every section of space around and inside the solar system itself. All commerce had to come here first, then be transferred to automated craft for an in-system run. No one but the military was allowed beyond the perimeter the picket ships established, and even military personnel never landed. The penalty for any violation was simple—capture if possible, elimination if not possible. Between the automatic guardians and the manned patrols a violator might get by one or two, but he would have to run a gauntlet of several hundred to get anywhere meaningful—and do so against the best defensive computers known.

For this reason, the pinpointing of the Warden Diamond as the center of some alien conspiracy was met with a great deal of skepticism by the organized military forces, most of which believed that the alien robot -had simply practiced misdirection in desperation after being discovered.

The analytical computers and strategic specialists thought otherwise. At least, they couldn’t afford not to think otherwise, which explained the arrival of a very special man at the base ship. They all knew he was special, and rumors abounded as to who he was, whom he worked for, and what he was doing there; but no one, not even the commanding admiral, really knew for sure.

With the man came a complete module that niter-locked to the building-block nature of the base ship in the security control section. Prom here the mysterious man would do whatever he was doing, away from all others, surrounded by security guards who had no idea who he was or what he was doing—and who could not enter the module any more than the admiral could. It was keyed to the man’s own brain waves, voice print, retinal pattern, gene structure, and just about everything else any paranoid security division had ever figured out. Anyone else attempting entry would be instantly stopped and neatly packaged for security. Any nonliving thing that tried would be instantly vaporized.

Although the man had been there for months, not a soul even knew his name. Not that he was totally withdrawn—on the contrary, he joined in the sports games in Recreation, ate his meals in the Security Mess, even wined and dined some female soldiers and civilians aboard, many of whom were simply intrigued by this man of mystery. He was likable, easygoing, relaxed. But in all those months he had not revealed the slightest thing about himself, not even to those with whom he’d been most intimate—although, security officers noted, he’d had a positive knack of finding out the most private things about the people with whom he’d come in contact. They admired him for his total self-control and absolute professionalism, and even the highest-ranking of them were scared stiff of him.

He spent several hours most days in his little cubicle, and always slept there. They all wondered and guessed at what was inside until they were almost crazy with curiosity, but they never guessed the truth.

He heard the buzzer sounding as he entered the command module and for the first tune felt genuine excitement and anticipation. Long ago he’d accomplished all he could with the physical data, but for too long now it had been a boring exercise. The computer filed what it could from the memory traces but gave him a picture that was too emotional and incomplete when examined in his own mind to make much sense. Hoping this time would be different, he headed for the master command chair and sat comfortably in it. The computer, sensing its duty, lowered the small probes, which he placed around his head, then administered the measured injections and began the master readout.

For a while he floated in a sennhypnotic fog, but slowly images started forming in his brain as they had before. Only now they seemed more definite, clearer, more like his own thoughts. The drugs and small neural probes did their job. His own mind and personality receded, replaced by a similar, yet oddly different pattern.

“The agent is commanded to report,” the computer ordered, sending the command deep into his own mind, a mind no longer his own.

What would happen, or so the techs had advised him, would amount to a sort of total recall from the mind of his counterpart down below, information his own mind would sort, classify, and edit into a coherent narrative.

Recorders clicked on.

Slowly the man in the chair cleared his throat several times. It still took more than three hours to get him to do anything beyond mumbling some odd words or sounds, but the computers were nothing if not patient, knowing that the man’s mind was receiving a massive amount of data and was struggling to sort and classify it.

Finally the man began to speak.