Shadow on the Sand

Chapter I Mission

They said to Amro, “And now you will learn a new language.”

There was no desire in him to ask them where the language was spoken and why he was to learn it. He permitted himself to speculate but one of the first rules learned by agents of the Center is that no activity is more purposeless than asking questions. All information that you must know is given to you. The proper outlet for zeal is in performance of the assigned duties. And Amro had been a Center agent for five Stradian years.

He knew that he was a good agent — one of the very best. It gave him a quiet pride to think of it. His body was good — as hard and perfect and tireless as though made of metal and leather. Other agents had been able to withstand seven and eight complete facial operations before the flesh and bone began to rebel.

Amro had been given, during his five years, fourteen separate identities and when the surgeons had last examined him they had reported no signs of tissue weariness. When no more operations could be performed it became necessary to resort to the mask-maker’s art and that was never as completely satisfactory.

But there were more than physical requirements. More important than knowing ten silent ways to kill a man with his hands, than being an expert with knife and farris, were the emotional factors. Amro possessed an almost infinite patience, a thorough lack of imagination, straight-line logic and the ability to make a decision in the smallest fraction of a second.

As a case in point there was the affair of Morr, the almost senile member of the appropriations council. Morr was important only because he sat at council next to Strell, the man most thoroughly suspicious of the Center, the man determined to emasculate the Center through forcing a full scale investigation. Strell, being a shrewd man, had himself guarded every moment with his guard detail screened for substitutions several times each day.

The Center had picked Morr up after Amro had spent two months being prepared, fattened, softened, altered. During the two months Amro had learned to imitate to perfection Morr’s every movement. As Morr, Amro sat in on eleven council meetings before the chance came. It had to be done in such a way that it would not point to the Center.

Amro did it without awakening the suspicion of the two guards who watched the murder.

As the eleventh meeting ended Amro stood up at the same moment as Strell and blundered clumsily into him. To the watchers, Strell appeared to trip and fall toward the table. His bulk screened the quick movement of Amro’s arm as he grasped the front of Strell’s tunic and, with savage force, pulled and guided the fall so that the bridge of Strell’s nose hit the sharp table edge.

That evening the drugged Morr was given the final details. He was placed in his own chambers to awaken the next morning with a complete “memory” of all that had happened...

So now they said, “You will learn a new language.”

He was taken to one of the small windowless rooms where the equipment awaited him. There were a couch, a food terminal, sanitation facilities, an exercise rack. He shut the door behind him. When he was fluent in the language he would open the door. It was that simple.

He selected a spindle at random and threaded it into the instructor. Amro was pleased to hear that, unlike the pipings of the kalla or the metallic clatterings of the Shen, this tongue would not require the use of one of the converters plus ear filters.

The spindles showed no signs of wear. He could not recall ever having heard the language spoken. He shrugged, attached the basic spindle sequence, took two of the learning acceleration tablets, stretched out on the couch and pressed the wall switch.

By the tenth day he was sufficiently fluent to request written texts. He was told that none had been prepared but that he would be given tests prepared by the people in question.

They arrived and they were most curious. He sat on the couch and handled them. In the first place they were printed on a white fragile substance which was new to him. And after many hours of intense effort, aided by captions under many pictures in the texts, he managed to identify specific words he had learned — discovering in the process that the writing was from left to right in a horizontal pattern, continuous as the white sheets were turned from right to left.

In four more days he was reading rapidly, absorbing facts on the mores, folkways, artifacts, ethics and social structure of a large and almost completely alien culture. Almost was the word to use because the aliens as shown in the pictures could just as well have been Stradians. Of course, because the other items in the pictures furnished no points of reference, they could be as tall as his little finger or three times his height, but he had the belief that they were like himself.

He was able to prove this when he found in one of the texts a measurement which he believed to be a universal constant, a table of displacements of metals. He had proven to his own satisfaction that the “gold” of which they spoke was identical to Stradian eronal. With a common starting point he was able to convert their units of linear measurement into Stradian tables and prove that they were indeed identical in height to the average Stradian.

This information caused a small germ of excitement to grow in him. Stradian statistical biologists had proved to everyone’s satisfaction that the probability of identical races springing up on two planets was almost zero — identical, that is, in physical form.

The statistical psychologists had proved that any dominant high-order intelligent species, no matter what the physical form involved, will share with all other dominant species the common factors of power-hunger, ruthlessness, egocentricity and thalamic reasoning. The bitter warfare antedating the colonization of the home planets of the Kalla and the Shen were cases in point.

Thus he read with the idea of comparing similarities and dissimilarities between the men of Strada and the men of this place called Earth.

And he found that the Earthmen were weak. Weak physically in that it was a rare Earthman who could lift more than his own weight. Weak emotionally in that there were societies and organizations dedicated to the aim of stamping out “cruelty” to lesser organisms. Amro struggled with the word “cruelty” for a long time and in the end he was not completely satisfied with his own interpretation.

Their society had social weaknesses in that conflicts of ideology were permitted to be aired and voted upon by everyone, thus dragging out over many years a conflict that could have been decided in the very beginning by a few discreet assassinations. Their whole society gave him a feeling of disorderliness — of vagueness. It seemed full of cross-currents, hints, unwritten suggestions. There were many theologies but their amorphous connotations were beyond him.

In the back of one text he found maps of their world. The ratio of ocean to land was not unlike Strada — in fact he seemed to be able to detect similarities in the continental outlines. Like Strada Earth had polar caps and a tropical belt around the widest circumference. This appeared to refute the statistical geographers who had long since adopted as a basic concept the rule of planetary dissimilarity.

Technologically they were backward even though their dominant cultures were technistic. This did not surprise him. On the planet itself their warring groups were separated on a “geographical” and a “linguistic” basis rather than on a social basis as on Strada. Such rigid compartmentalization would, of course, mean a serious drag on scientific advancement.

They were in the eight-minus level, apparently. Later, when he found a reference to the manufacture of radioactives, he quickly revised it to six-minus, knowing that these people were on the verge of Newtonian sub-light space travel.

At the end of the seventeenth day he opened the door and left the room. Lofta, who had been his monitor for three years, a man grown heavy and gray in the service of the Center, saw Amro within the hour.

Amro still wore the sagging face of Morr though his body had leaned and hardened. He stood at the prescribed position until Lofta motioned him to be seated.

Amro felt the blunt thrust of Lofta’s mind and there was a sudden reaction of anger. Surely by this time Lofta knew better than to violate his mental privacy as though he were dealing with a recruit!

He yielded before the probing, putting up token resistance only, then dropped all defense, accepting the pain in order to slash back, catching Lofta completely off balance. The older man grunted with the shock, recovered himself on the very verge of fainting, smiled grimly. “You grow, Amro,” he said.

“I am obedient but I have pride.”

Lofta sighed. “We shall not be angry with each other. What have you learned along with the language you were given?”

“Am I to describe the race?”

“Of course not! Surely you found something odd in the entire problem.”

“It refutes certain accepted rules of the sciences, particularly of the statistical branches. A similar race and a similar planet should not exist.”

“Nothing else?”

“No.”

“Then you overlooked another seeming coincidence merely because it was too evident. Their day and night corresponds to ours and their climate. This indicates a similar rotation of the planet on its axis and a probable similar distance from their sun. If you have made conjectures about this state of affairs you may report them.”

Amro frowned. “It has been proven, Lofta, that one hundred and fifty thousand of our years ago the Stradai had a greater civilization than we have now. We found evidence in the legends of the Kalla and the Shen that our remote ancestors had visited them. No one knows what happened.

“The Stradai went back to barbarian-ism and we have come back up the long road. Now you have given me evidence of this other civilization. I have heard of no report by the exploration cruises. Therefore the planet must be very remote. I would guess that before our previous civilization collapsed Stradai were placed on this very similar planet.

“Granting the existence of an almost infinite number of planets it would be possible to find one, maybe, very like Strada. It could even be possible that some of the Stradai emigrated to that planet called Earth when they saw the signs of collapse here. They too lost their science, possibly from the same unknown cause. We have grown again and we have surpassed them. To think of Earth as a lost colony accounts for the unexplained similarities.”

“Excellent, Amro. Excellent.”

“I am right?”

“You said that the planet is very remote. We do not have a ship which can reach it.”

Amro started in surprise. “The longest possible trip is six billion light years, Lofta. Beyond that point there is no way to avoid returning eventually to the starting point. Even if there were a second universe placed somehow beyond this one, it has been proven impossible to ‘break through’ the enfolding of space.”

“I do not speak of a second universe beyond this one, Amro. I merely said that no ship can reach this Earth of which we speak — yet.”

“Then why do I waste time with their language. You speak in riddles.”

“Now you are angry again. Do I speak in riddles? We have no ship that can reach that planet, yet it is intended that you shall reach it, Amro — you and others of the Center. You may think about this.

“You are dismissed. Faven and Massio have learned the language. Others are learning. You will find them in room A-Two Hundred Thirteen point Nine. Join them there and practise this language. Within a short time we will have the subjects for substitution.”

Amro went to the door. “I would like a young one.”

“You are in no position to make a request.”

Amro shrugged and left.

Faven and Massio were laughing when he walked in. He had once worked with Faven and their dislike was mutual. She was tall for a woman with a deep coldness and a watchfulness about her that never failed to remind him of the furred animals tamed by the Kalla. She wore the face of her last substitution, a face he had not seen before, snub-nosed and gay, with flame hair and a wide mouth. Massio he had never met. The man was younger and slighter than Amro.

Faven had a nasty trick of plunging without warning a rapier of inquiry into the minds of her equals and inferiors, a darting stinging thing, agile as quicksilver. She indulged her hates and her lusts with equal ferocity. Amro had tried and failed to root out of himself the small feeling of fear that she gave him.

She was the only thing under the sun of Strada that he did fear.

She introduced them in a mocking way, using the new tongue. Massio and Amro responded in kind.

“Where are we going?” Faven asked. “That seems to be the question. Lofta was self-consciously vague.” She stretched luxuriously, again reminding him of one of the furred beasts, lay back on the couch and pouted at them.

“Wherever it is important,” Amro said. “I am no longer used on unimportant missions nor are you, Faven. And Massio, here, has been honored for the work he did on Caenia with the subsection of the Center there. To put three of us on the same mission implies that it is of the highest importance to the Center.”

“Or the highest importance to the League,” Faven said lazily.

“We are growing weaker,” Massio said, his voice heavy.

“Damn the League,” Amro said. He paced restlessly. “When is this pretense of friendship going to stop? When are the agents of the Center and the agents of the League coming out from underground for honest warfare?”

“I like it the way it is,” Faven said. “I like stealth and darkness. You know what will happen when it comes out in the open. We know too much. We can nova a sun, explode a planet, blast a sea into steam in a tenth of a second. What good is an individual under those circumstances? No, let us stay quietly nibbling at each other’s throats. At that game I can be of some use.”

“If we could strike first we could get it over with,” Amro insisted. “What if after we have won there are only a handful of planets? They’ll be Center planets, won’t they? Ultimate victory?”

“And if no planets are left?” Massio asked. “Just a few manned ships in the wilderness of space?”

“Then,” Amro said, “those ships can find suitable planets and they will carry the seed of our science.”

“You talk rot,” Faven said irritably. “The Center and the League are, as far as two trillion peaceful citizens are concerned, big chummy organizations working hand in glove for the betterment of all. It was set up as a check and balance system with the League responsible for all administration and government, the Center responsible for all research and scientific advances.

“When it was set up the smart ones didn’t realize that the League, holding the purse strings, would try to emasculate the Center and take over little by little the research end, fattening their own pockets, turning themselves into a happy little monopoly of everything.”

Massio said bitterly, “So the Center struck back by setting up secret research projects, taking over administration and government on outlying planet groups. I wonder if those peaceful citizens you speak about, Faven, ever wonder about the high mortality rate among the surface staff of the Center and the League.”

“Two conflicting basic ideas of social structure cannot exist side by side,” Amro said. “Either we become a useless appendage to the League, or we take over the reins the way we should. It’s that simple.”

“Amro, the disciple of violence,” Faven said, yawning. “That idea of yours about striking first is dandy. But how? Their espionage is as good or maybe even better than ours. Four fifths of Center agents are constantly assigned to the problem of seeing that they don’t strike first. Do you think their forces are distributed any differently?

“Your reasoning has always been superficial, Amro. In order to strike first, there has to be a concentration of power and a place to strike from. Their surveillance makes that as impossible for us as ours makes it impractical for them. And neither side will move into the open unless they can be sure of complete surprise. Outnumbering is no good when one determined space cruiser left at large can reverse the entire war.”

Massio stood up. He wore a puzzled look. “I wonder—”

“What?” Faven asked.

“Maybe this unheard-of planet could be the base, the place for a concentration of power.”

The three of them were silent. Amro hit his hard thigh with a clenched fist. “It could be exactly that!”

The excitement in them slowly dwindled as the hours went by. They practised the new tongue for a long time and then played a word game. Massio devised in his mind a complicated sentence of ten words and then projected them, one at a time, into Amro’s mind.

To receive each word Amro had to relax his guard at the moment he felt the thrust and then close his mind before Faven could catch the word. Faven could either snatch the word by thrusting at Massio’s mind during the moment of sending or by entering Amro’s mind during the fraction of a second of relaxation.

To Amro’s intense annoyance she made no attempt to wrest the word from Massio. On the third word she slipped by his guard with perfect timing, thrusting so unnecessarily deep that the pain sickened him for a moment. She did the same on the sixth and seventh word and that gave her enough to guess the sense of the sentence. Since she had wrested the words from Amro she took his place for the next round with Massio sending again.

Amro concentrated on Faven, annoyed beyond measure as he counted the transmittal of six words, stopped each time by the rapidity with which she erected a guard against intrusion.

The seventh word slipped by. Amro suddenly jumped up and turned toward the door, his body tense. He anticipated that, for a fraction of a second, Faven would assume receptivity for whoever might be approaching the door.

He thrust back along that channel of receptivity with all his strength, smashing so far back into her mind that he reached the threshold of the instinctive level. He plucked the seven transmitted words out of her fading mind as he turned just in time to see her topple from the couch.

She recovered almost immediately and crouched there, her mouth twisting and working. “You’re vile!” she said.

“It’s a lesson you’ve been needing, Faven. And watch what you say. You won’t have immunity back for several minutes. Do you understand?” He thrust along the same channel again, pushing easily by the slowly accumulating resistance, seeing her eyes lose focus, her lips pale. “I could do you serious damage,” he said gently.

“I hate you,” she gasped.

He grinned, resting easily within her mind, feeling the hate shadows and the pain. The will eluded him, circling like a trapped thing until he clenched it firmly. Still smiling he brought her to her feet and toward him in the jerky uncoordinated walk of the hypnotic resistance level. He forced her to drop to her knees, caress his foot and kiss the bare instep. Then he released her.

To his shocked surprise she did not move but stayed there, looking up at him. He waited for the return whiplash of her mind as her strength returned. Her eyes, however, held no glint of anger. He pushed gently and found her mind completely open and undefended, held open by her will.

He probed until he found the thought, sparklingly clear, “You should have punished me long ago, Amro.”

“Why?”

“No one has ever been able to discipline me before. I’ll do anything you ask of me.”

I’ll at ease, he walked over to the food terminal, said aloud, “Do you have any particular preferences, Faven, Massio? I starve.”

“Order for me,” Faven said.

When he looked around she was seated on the couch, her eyes glowing. Massio acted embarrassed.

They selected the food and they ate.