The Silent Invaders

FIVE

They marched him out of the room and led him into a gravshaft that rose, rather than fell. Up, up, out of who knew what subterranean depths under the city. He pondered the “sunlight” he had thought he saw coming through the barred window, and realized that he had deceived himself. The gravshaft shot upward endlessly, until he came to a halt with an abrupt jiggle and slid open to discharge him onto the main level of an enormous office building.

He stood for a moment in the crowded lobby. Earthers and aliens of all descriptions were busily going through the grand concourse. Slowly, Harris walked toward the nearest exit, and out into the noisy, bustling street. It was still fairly early in the morning, and the day was mild and sunny.

There was a streetguide mounted against a wall half a block from where he had emerged. He walked to it and peered at the crosshatched lines of the city map. At first he had difficulty getting his bearings. A red circle marked his present location, but none of the streets rang in his memory. Only when he glanced completely across the map did he discover the section of the city where his hotel was located.

They had taken him miles from the hotel, then. He fed a small coin into the slot and punched out coordinates as the sign instructed, and a glowing light illuminated the path from his present site to the hotel. It was, he guessed, at least an hour’s journey by helitaxi from here.

He walked on. The spirals of a public helitaxi ramp gleamed yellow in the early sunlight not far ahead. He passed an open-air cafe, and the smell of newly baked bread and fresh coffee clawed at his stomach. But, hungry as he was, he knew he had no time to bother about breakfast until he had gotten in touch with the Darruui chief agent and passed the story along. A waiter came out and smiled at him hopefully, pointing to a vacant curbside table, but Harris shook his head and moved on.

He thought about Beth Baldwin and her words.

It seemed too transparent, too much of a strain on his credulity. All this talk of supermen and altruism, of fledgling mutant races that had to be coddled along and protected from the jealous furies of their obsolescent ancestors.

It made no real sense, Harris thought. Nothing that he knew of Medlin psychology led him to believe they would make themselves parties to any such absurd project. If anything, he reasoned, the Medlins would take quick steps to throttle any upsurge of new and potentially dangerous abilities among the Terrans. As would the Darruui, had they been the ones to discover the alleged mutants.

It was only a simple matter of self-preservation, after all. Supermen represent super-dangers. The universe was a precarious enough place as it was, without standing by complacently while new races came into being. Those that existed now were well enough balanced, strength for strength, in an uneasy but oddly comforting stalemate. Only madmen would allow an X factor to enter the situation—and only very deranged madmen indeed would actually help bring the X factor about.

No, he thought. There were no supermen. The idea made no sense at all—Medlin propaganda was devious stuff, and he had good reason to mistrust it.

Were they as simple as all that, though, to release him merely on his promise of good faith? After all, they knew his murderous intentions. Only some sort of sleight-of-hand on Beth’s part had saved her from death last night. And yet they had released him on his bland say-so of co-operation, after he had snapped and snarled at them for half an hour in scorn. If they were truly altruistic, it made sense, since in his lexicon pure altruists and pure fools were synonymous. But he knew the Medlins too well to swallow the idea that they could be as simple-minded as all that. Darkly he thought that they were using him as part of some larger Medlin plan.

Well, let Carver worry about it, he thought. It was his responsibility to form strategy and to meet Medlin challenges.

Harris reached the helitaxi ramp. A taxi was ready for takeoff, but a plump, pink-faced citizen of obvious self-importance scuttled past the Darruui, his green cape fluttering pompously behind him, and pressed his bulk into the car. Shrugging, Harris signalled for another. It whirred up the ramp and the door opened.

“Where to, Colonel?”

“Spaceways Hotel. And I’m only a Major,” he said, slipping back into character. “Thanks for the promotion, though.”

“Any time, Major.”

Powerful generators thrummed. The taxi lifted off and sought its level, under instructions from the master computer somewhere far beneath the city. Harris closed his eyes and settled back against the faintly acid-smelling cushion. The taxi was old, well worn. He listened to the droning of the computer voice.

He had never dreamed a city could be so huge. On Darruu, the size of cities was limited by an age-old statute to three million persons, and no city exceeded that. Of course, since all the planned urban formations had been developed for millenia, it meant that population was fairly stabilized. No new cities had been founded on Darruu for fifteen hundred years. All of the present cities had their maximum population quota. If you wanted to move to another city, you had to get a permit. That wasn’t so difficult, since there were always enough people moving back and forth to cancel out and keep each city at the statutory limit of three million.

But if you wanted to have a child—ah, that was something different. That had to be balanced against the death rolls, and death did not come early on Darruu. There were couples who had waited out their entire fertility span in fruitlessness without getting a permit, because of an uptick in longevity.

That did not concern Aar Khülom. As a Servant of the Spirit he did not have the right to reproduce himself. It was a sacrifice he freely made.

He did not question the system. It was a good one, he thought. It kept the planet stable, it encouraged emigration to the colony worlds, and it avoided helter-skelter urban scrambles of the kind he was experiencing now. He felt a sense of revulsion as he peered from the helitaxi ports at the city below, the endless city, the city of twenty or thirty or perhaps even fifty million humans, the city that stretched in gray rows to the horizon.

It was inconceivable to him that a city should have such distances that one could travel for fifty minutes by helitaxi within it. And he had not even gone from border to border. No, he had simply journeyed from a point near the southeast limb of the city to one near the heart of the city—and it had been nearly an hour’s trip, which meant a distance of hundreds of miles.

They were coming down, now.

The taxi swung in narrowing circles onto the landing ramp of the Spaceways Hotel. Harris paid the driver and headed straight into the hotel, and up to his room.

He activated the narrow-beam communiator, and waited until the metallic voice from the speaker said in code, “Carver here.”

“Harris speaking.”

“You’ve escaped?”

“Not exactly. They set me free of their own accord.”

“How’d you work that?”

“It’s a long story,” Harris said. “Did you get a directional fix on the building where they were holding me?”

“Yes. Why did they let you go?” Carver persisted.

Harris chuckled. “At their urging, I promised to become a Medlin secret agent. My first assignment,” he said pleasantly, “is to assassinate you.”

The answering chuckle that came from the speaker grid held little mirth. Carver said, “Is this some kind of joke?”

“The gospel.”

“You agreed to assassinate me?”

“First you, then the others.”

Carver paused. “All right, Harris. Fill me in on everything that’s happened to you since I saw you at the club last night.”

“I went back to the hotel,” Harris said. “I went to the Baldwin girl’s room, intending to remove her. But she was ready for me, ready and waiting. When she answered the door she had a disruptor in her hand.”

“What?”

“The Medlins know everything, Carver. But everything. They’re one step ahead of us all the way. I got the gun away from the girl, but she had a stunner on her and she let me have it. She said she’d been keeping tabs on me from the start, that she knew why I was here, that she knew about every phase of the Darruui mission here. Carver, there’s been a leak.”

“Impossible.”

“Is it? Listen, they know how many of us there are. She told me to my face that there are ten Darruui agents on Earth.”

“A lucky guess,” Carver scoffed.

“Maybe. But she knew my name. She knew my name, Carver ! She called me Aar Khülom! Was that a guess too?”

There was an instant of silence at the other end.

“Carver? I don’t hear you.”

“There’s no way she could have known that,” Carver said puzzledly. “No documents she could have captured anywhere that would give that away.”

“I tell you, they know everything. They know about the cut-off memory circuit too.”

“Impossible. Flatly impossible that they should know a thing like that.”

Harris began to feel impatient with his superior. Restraining his temper, he said as evenly as he could, “Do you choose not to believe me?”

“I believe you. But I don’t understand.”

“You think I do?”

“Very well. What else happened to you last night?”

“After she stunned me, she carted me off to the Medlin headquarters. It’s a sub-surface building far on the other side of town. When I woke up she introduced me to two staff members. A disguised Medlin named Paul Coburn and an oversized Earther who calls himself David Wrynn.”

“Coburn is on our list,” Carver said. “He’s Medlin Intelligence. I don’t know anything about this Wrynn. He is probably an Earthman as he says.”

Harris said, “The girl started giving me some weird line about raising a breed of super-Earthmen.” Quickly he repeated the story Beth had told about the supposed species of mutants. “They asked me if I would help them in this noble cause.”

“You agreed?”

“Of course I agreed,” Harris said. “They let me go and sent me out to handle my first assignment for them.”

“Which is?”

“I’m supposed to eradicate all the Darruui on Earth, beginning with you.”

“The others are well scattered,” Carver said.

“The Medlins seem to know where they are. The Medlins seem to know every phase of our operation from top to bottomn. You’d better start hunting for that security leak, Carver. One of your men’s been selling us out.”

Carver was silent for a moment. Then he said, “There’s only one thing we can do now. We’ll have to accelerate the program and strike at once. Surprise may overcome the disadvantages we’re under. We’ll attack the Medlin headquarters and kill as many of them as we can. Do you really think they trust you?”

“It’s hard to tell. I’m inclined to think that they don’t trust me at all, that they’re using me as bait for an elaborate trap,” Harris said.

“That’s more likely. Well, we’ll take their bait. Only they won’t be able to handle us once they’ve caught hold of us.”

“Don’t underestimate them, Carver.”

“I’m not. But don’t underestimate our strength either. Don’t underestimate yourself, Harris. Remember that we’re Servants of the Spirit. Doesn’t that count for something? What are a hundred Medlins against us, after all?”

Harris closed his eyes. His body throbbed with hunger, and at the moment, having had some demonstration at close range of Medlin abilities, he was not so buoyantly imbued with religious faith as was Carver.

He said noncommittally, “Yes. Yes, we must keep that in mind.”

Carver broke contact. Carefully Harris packed the equipment away again, watching it slither into the tesseract and vanish.

A prolonged session under the molecular showerbath was the next item on the agenda. The soothing abrasion of the dancing molecular particles not only ground away the grime of his night’s imprisonment, but rid his body of the poisons of fatigue, leaving him better able to face up to the new challenges the Medlins posed.

Breakfast came next. Dressing in a crisply laundered fresh uniform, he rode downstairs to the hotel restaurant and had a terran-style breakfast of fruit juice, hot rolls, bacon, coffee. For all his hunger, the meal was close to tasteless to him. The harsh acids of fear rolled in his digestive tract.

Returning to his room, he locked himself in, and threw himself wearily on the bed. He was a tired man, and a deeply troubled one. Superman, he thought.

He rolled the argument around in his mind for the hundredth time in the last two hours.

Did it make sense for the Medlins to rear and nurture a possible galactic conqueror? No, no, an infinity of times, no!

Earthmen were dangerous enough as it was, without laboring long and mightily to enhance their powers. Though the spheres of galactic influence still were divided as of old between Darruu and Medlin, the two-edged blade that had sundered the universe for millenia, the Earthmen in their bare three hundred years of galactic contact with the older races had taken giant strides toward holding a major place in the affairs of the universe.

Three hundred years was only a moment in galactic history. It had taken ten times that long for Darruu to reach outward and plant colonies. The active phase of the Darruu-Medlin conflict had gone on for nearly as long as the entire dominant culture-group of Earth had been in cohesive existence. The present, or inactive phase of the conflict, had begun when Earthers were still using animal-drawn vehicles for transportation.

Yet a slim three centuries had gone by since the first Earther ship broke the barrier of light, and in the time since then they had planted colonies halfway across the galaxy, stretching on to the dim reaches of the star cluster. The Interstellar Development Corps, of which he in the guise of Abner Harris claimed to be a member, had planted colonies of Earthmen indiscriminately on any uninhabited and habitable world of the galaxy that was not claimed by Darruu or Medlin—including some that both the older races had written off as uninhabitable by oxygen-breathing species.

And the Medlins, the ancient enemies of his people, the race that he had been taught all his life to regard as the embodiment of evil—these Medlins were aiding Earthmen to progress to a plane of development far beyond anything either Darruu or Medlin had attained?

Ridiculous, he thought.

No race knowingly and enthusiastically breeds its own destruction, not even a race of fools. And the Medlins were anything but fools.

Certainly not fools enough to let me get out of their hands on nothing but a mere promise that I’ll turn traitor and help them, he thought.

He shook his head in bewilderment.

After a while he rose, got his precious flask of Darruui wine, uncorked it, poured a small quantity out into a glass. He held the glass in the palm of his hand a long moment without drinking it, warming the wine so that he could inhale the bouquet.

Finally he lifted the wine to his lips and allowed himself a grudging sip. It was almost unbearable to taste the velvet-textured dark wine of his homeworld again. It soothed him a little, but the ultimate result was simply to increase beyond toleration his already painful longing for home.

He closed his eyes and pictured the vineyards of Moruun Türa, ripening slowly in the crimson mists of summer. He had been born in the wine country. He remembered the cellars of his grandfather’s house, with the casks of wine a century old and more, ranged in dusty rows. Only on special occasions were those casks disturbed. On the day of his coming of age, they had let him sip wine that was young when the Earthers were still planetbound. On the day of the trimming of his birth-tree, his grandfather let him taste the tongue-searing pure brandy he distilled.

On the day of his adoption into the ranks of the Servants of the Spirit, the wine had flowed freely too. Old wine, new wine. A joyous night, that one had been, a night never to forget.

Now, on Darruu, the grapes hung heavy on the vines, swelling with sugar, ripening, almost ready to ferment. Soon it would be harvest-time, and then weeks afterward the first bottles of new wine would reach the shops, and in Moruun Türa there would be the days of thanksgiving, when wine flowed like water in praise of the Spirit that had granted the summer’s blessings, and women gave themselves to all without stint, and happiness reigned.

This would be the first year, he realized, that he had not tasted the new vintage while it still held the bouquet of youth. On Darruu they would be gathering to pronounce the verdict on this year’s vintage. But they would do it without him. He would not share that time of happiness this year, and perhaps never again would he know the joys of vintage time. Others back home would have the delights.

While I find myself on a strange planet, wearing a strange skin, and caught up in the toils of the devil Medlins, he thought.

He scowled darkly, and took another sip of wine to ease the ache his heart felt.