The Silent Invaders

FOUR

Harris felt a teeth-chattering chill sweep through him as he began to come awake. There was a hammering back of his eyeballs, and a sick hollowness in his stomach. The stunner-bolt had temporarily overloaded his motor neurons, and the body’s escape from the frustration of paralysis was unconsciousness.

Now he was waking, and the strength was ebbing slowly and painfully back into his muscles. His entire body felt drained, depleted.

The light of morning streamed palely in through a depolarized window on the left wall of the unfamiliar room in which he found himself. He was not bound in any way. He felt stiff and sore all over, every muscle cramped and congested. He wondered where he had spent the night. Not in any bed, certainly. Probably right here on the cold floor of this room.

He put his hands to his forehead and pressed hard. The throbbing seemed to stop, but the relief was only momentary. It was no joke to be a stunnergun victim. He had been stunned only once before in his life, and that had been a glancing, accidental swipe during a training session. This had been a full-on charge, two shots. The stunner was considered a mild weapon, but the medicos claimed that the body couldn’t stand more than two or three stunnings in any one year. An overdose of stunnings and the nerves just gave up entirely, the muscles stopped working in despair—including the muscle of the heart, and the muscles that work the lungs.

Harris got unsteadily to his feet and surveyed the room. The cell, rather. The window was high on the wall, beyond his reach, and covered over with a welded grid just to make escape even less possible. There was no sign of a door anywhere. Obviously some section of the wall folded away to admit people to the room—they hadn’t jammed him in through that tiny window—but the door and door-jamb, wherever they might be, must have been machined as smoothly as a couple of jo-blocks, because there was absolutely no sign of a break in the wall.

He was trapped.

A fine fix for a Servant of the Spirit, he told himself bitterly. To be outmaneuvered by a girl—a Medlin girl at that—to get into a hopeless muddle of emotions; to be jumped and outdrawn; to let himself get stunned and captured; it was hardly a record to be proud of, he thought. His mission on Earth had certainly not gotten off to an auspicious start, though it might very well be coming to an unexpectedly rapid conclusion.

He looked up. There was a grid in the ceiling, circular, six or seven inches in diameter. The air-conditioning vent, no doubt—and probably it housed some spy-mechanism also, through which they could watch him and communicate with him.

He stared at the grid and said in a sour voice, “Okay, whoever you are. I’m awake now. You can come in and work me over.”

There was no immediate response, other than a faint hum that told of an electronic ear within the grid. Surreptiously, Harris slipped a hand inside his waistband and pinched up a fold of flesh between his thumb and index finger, squeezing it gently. The action set in operation a minute amplifier that was embedded there. A distress signal, directionally modulated, was sent out to any Darruui agents who might be within a thousand-mile radius. He completed the gesture by lazily scratching his chest, stretching, yawning.

He waited.

And endless two or three minutes ticked by. Then his attention was caught by a chittering sound in the wall, and an instant later a segment of the wall flipped upward out of sight in some clever way that he could not detect.

Three figures entered the cell.

Harris recognized one of the three: Beth. She had changed into a fresh, simple tunic, and she was smiling at him with genuine warmth, apparently untroubled by his attempt to murder her the night before.

“Good morning, Major,” she said sweetly.

Harris glared bleakly at her, then looked at the other two who stood behind her.

One was an ordinary looking sort of Earther, an even-featured, forgettable kind of man just under middle height. The other was rather special, Harris saw. He stood about six feet eight or even taller, well-proportioned for his height, with a regularity of feature that seemed startlingly beautiful even to Harris’ Darruu-oriented viewpoint.

Beth said, “Major Abner Harris, formerly Aar Khülom of Darruu, this is Paul Coburn of Medlin Intelligence.” She indicated the Earther of undistinguished appearance.

“How do you do?” the Medlin who called himself Paul Coburn said blandly, putting out his hand.

Harris studied the hand disdainfully without taking it. He knew the meaning of a handshake on Earth, and he was damned if he’d shake hands with any Medlin intelligence operators.

Beth seemed unbothered by Harris’ lack of civility. She indicated the giant and said, “And this is David Wrynn, of Earth.”

“A real home-grown-native-born Earthman?” Harris asked sardonically. “Not just a laboratory-made phony like the rest of us?”

Wrynn smiled pleasantly and said, “I assure you that I’m a completely domestic product, Major Harris.” His voice was like the mellow boom of a well-tuned cello, and his smile was so piercingly friendly that it made Harris uncomfortable.

The Darruui folded his arms and glared. “Well. How nice of you to introduce us all. Now what? A game of cards? Chess? Tea?”

“Still belligerent,” he heard Beth murmur to the other Medlin, Coburn. Coburn nodded and whispered something in return that Harris could not catch. The giant Earthman merely looked unhappy in a serenely unruffled way.

Harris eyed them all coldly and snapped, “Well, if you’re going to torture me, why not get started with it and not waste so much time?”

“Who said anything about torture?” Beth asked.

“Why else would you bring me here? Obviously you want to wring information from me. Well, go ahead,” Harris said. “Do your worst. I’m ready for you.”

Coburn chuckled and fingered the soft rolls of flesh under his chin. “Don’t you think that we’re well aware how useless it would be to torture you?” he asked mildly. “That if we tried any kind of neural entry to your mind, your memory-chambers would automatically short-circuit out?”

Harris’ jaw dropped in shock. “How did you ever find out…”

He stopped. The Medlins evidently had a fantastically efficient spy service, he thought shakenly. The filter-circuit in his brain was a highly secret development, known only to Darruui surgeons and agents.

Beth said, “Relax and listen to us, will you? We aren’t out to torture you. I mean that seriously. We already know all you can tell us.”

“Doubtful. But go ahead and talk.”

“We know how many Darruui are on Earth, and we know approximately where they are.”

“Really, now?”

“There are ten of you, aren’t there?”

He kept his face expressionless. Were they bluffing him to test their own guesses, or did they really know? He shrugged and said, “Maybe there are ten and maybe there are ten thousand.”

“There are ten,” Beth said. “Ten and no more. It happens to be the truth. Only ten.”

“Perhaps.”

“One of the ten is right here—you. A second one is also in this city—Carver. The other eight are scattered. We have a particular job in mind for you, Major. We’d like you to seek out your nine comrades, to be a contact man for us.”

“To what end?”

“To the end of killing the other nine Darruui on Earth,” Beth said simply.

Harris smiled. It was laughable that they could ask him so earnestly to commit high treason, as though they thought that by simple rational persuasion they could get him to change sides. Were they just fools, or were they playing some devilishly subtle game with him?

“Is there any special reason,” he asked slowly, “why I should seek out my friends and comrades and murder them for you?”

“For the good of the universe.”

He laughed derisively. “An abstraction is the last refuge of an idiot. For the good of the universe? You think that has any meaning? You want me to do it for the good of Medlin, you mean. It’ll be easier if I kill them than if you do—you won’t have it on your pretty consciences and so you’re asking me to…”

“No,” Beth said. “Will you listen to me and let me explain?”

“I’m waiting. It had better be a damned good explanation.”

She ran her tongue lightly over her lips. Much as he despised her, Harris thought, he was still painfully affected by her physical beauty. Her synthetic beauty, he told himself—but the argument had no effect.

Beth said, “When we arrived on Earth—it was a good many years ago, by the way—we explored the situation and made a surprising discovery. We found out that a new race was evolving here, a new type of Earthman. A super-race, you might say. A breed of Earthmen with abnormal physical and mental powers.

“But in most cases children of this new race were killed or mentally stunted before they reached maturity. They were out of tune with the species around them, and their very apartness caused trouble for them. Often they felt the need to prove themselves in some way—and swam ten miles out to sea and couldn’t get back. Or they pushed their extraodinary reflexes too far even for them—raced automobiles dangerously, climbed murderous mountains, and so on. Some of them committed suicide out of sheer loneliness. Some were murdered by the normals, murdered outright, or crippled emotionally by parents who were jealous of the child they had brought into the world. People tend to resent being made obsolete—and even a super-child is unable to defend himself until he’s learned how. By then it’s usually too late.”

It was a nice fairy-tale, Harris thought, idly. He made no comment, but listened with apparent interest.

Beth went on, “Despite all the handicaps, these mutants continued to crop up. It was a persistent genetic constellation, but we realized that unless enough members of the new species could be allowed to live to maturity, to meet others and marry, the mutation would wither and drop back into the pool of genes that didn’t make it.

“We discovered isolated members of this new race here and there on Earth, scattered in every continent. We decided to help them—knowing they would help us, some day in the future, when we would need them to stand by us. So we sought them out. We found the super-children, and we protected them. It had to be done subtly, because we ourselves were interlopers on Earth and couldn’t bear the risk of exposure. But it worked. We got the children away from their parents, we brought them together, we raised them in safety.”

Beth pointed at the giant. “David Wrynn here is one of our first discoveries.”

Harris glanced at the big Earthman. “So you’re a superman?” he asked bluntly.

Wrynn smiled. With a diffident shrug he said, “I’m somewhat better equipped for life than most other Earthmen, let’s say. I can’t fly by flapping my arms, I can’t hold my breath for two hours under water, but I’m an improvement in the breed all the same. My children will be as far beyond me as I am beyond my parents.”

Beth said earnestly, passionately, “Do you see, Harris? Can you get the Darruui blinkers off your eyes and understand? Our purpose here on Earth is to aid this evolving race until it’s capable of taking care of itself—which won’t be too long, now. The species is reaching the self-generating stage. There are more than a hundred of them, of which thirty are adults. But now, in the middle of our work, Darruui agents have started to arrive on Earth. They’ve carried the long rivalry between our worlds to this planet, which doesn’t want any part of our struggle. And the Darruui purpose is to obstruct us, to interfere with our actions, and to win Earth over to what they think is their ‘cause.’ They aren’t smart enough to understand that they’re backing a dead horse.”

Harris stared at her levelly, wondering how much of a fool she really thought he was. Finally he said, “Tell me something honestly.”

“Everything I’ve said has been honest. What do you want to know?”

“What’s your motive in bringing this super-race into being?”

Beth shook her head. “Motive?” she said. “You Darruui always think in terms of motives, don’t you? Profit and reward, quid pro quo. Major, can you understand what I’m talking about when I tell you that there’s nothing in this for us at all?”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing but the satisfaction of knowing we’re helping to bring something wonderful into being in the universe, something that wouldn’t exist without our help and encouragement.”

Harris swallowed that with a goodly ration of salt. The concept of pure altruism was not unknown on Darruu, certainly, but altruism had its limits. It seemed highly improbable that a planet would go to all the trouble and expense of sending emissaries across space for the sole purpose of serving as midwives to an emerging race of Terran super beings.

No, he thought.

It didn’t hold up to close scrutiny.

This whole fantastic story of hers was simply part of an elaborately conceived propaganda maneuver whose motives did not lie close to the surface.

There were no supermen, Harris thought. Wrynn was tall and handsome, but there was nothing about him that could not be accounted for in the normal distribution curve of Terran physiques. For that matter, he might not be an Earthman at all, Harris reflected—in all probability Wrynn was a Medlin himself, on whom the surgeons had done an especially good job.

Harris could not fathom the scheme’s depths. But whatever the Medlins’ motives, he made up his mind to play along with them and go where it led him. By this time, Carver had almost certainly picked up his distress signal and most likely had calculated the location of the place where he was being held.

Harris said cautiously, “All right. So you’re busily raising a breed of super-Earthmen, and you want me to help.”

“Yes”

“How?”

“We told you,” Beth said. “By disposing of your nine Darruui comrades. Getting them out of the way before they make things more complicated for us than they already have become.”

Harris said levelly, “You’re asking me with straight faces to commit high treason against my people, in other words.”

“We know what sort of a man you are,” Beth said. “We have—techniques. We know you, Aar Khülom. We know that you aren’t in sympathy with the imperialistic ideals of the Darruui ruling council. You may think you are, you may have brainwashed yourself into thinking so, for your own safety on Darruu, but you really aren’t. You’ve got the stuff of a traitor in you. And I don’t mean that as an insult. I mean it as the highest compliment I know how to give a member of your race.”

I’ll play along, Harris thought.

He said, “You know, you people are so perceptive it frightens me.”

“How so?”

“You see with clear eyes. I don’t even understand my own motivations, but you do. When they sent me here I was unsure of what I was doing. I didn’t know what advantage it was to Darruu to gain Earth’s sympathies. All I knew was I had to block the Medlin thrust. A blind, negative reason for journeying here. And now—now I’m not so sure about the values I’ve put so much blind faith in…”

“Will you join us?” Beth asked.

Harris paused. “I might as well admit it. You’re right. I didn’t want to take the Earth assignment in the first place, but I had no choice. I begin to see that I’m on the wrong side. What can I do to help?”

Coburn and Beth exchanged glances. The “Earthman” Wrynn merely smiled.

Have I overplayed my hand? he wondered. Did it seem too obvious, too plainly phony? Maybe I should have held out a while longer before seeming to jump sides.

But Beth said, “I knew you’d co-operate, Major.”

“What’s my first assignment?”

“Target number one is the man who calls himself John Carver. Once you get rid of him, the other Darruui agents are without a nerve-center. After him, the other eight will be easy to nip.”

“How do you know I won’t trick you once you’ve released me?” Harris asked.

Coburn said, “We have ways of keeping watch over you, Major.”

He didn’t elaborate. Harris simply nodded and said, “All right. I’ll go after Carver first. I’ll get in touch with you as soon as he’s out of the way.”