The Silent Invaders Read online

  He stared at her. “Suppose I hadn’t gotten that emergency message, though. Suppose I had no idea of what you really were. We were going to come here to your room and drink and probably make love. Would you… would you have gone to bed with me, even knowing what you knew?”

  She was silent a moment.

  Then she said, without emotion, “Most likely. It would have been most interesting to see what sort of biological reactions the Darruui surgeons are capable of building.”

  A flash of savage, blind hatred rippled through Harris-Khülom. The bitch ! he thought. He had been raised to hate Medlins anyway; they were the ancient ancestral enemies of his people, galactic rivals of the Darruui for four thousand years, perhaps more. The mere sight of a Medlin was enough to stir rage in a Darruui. Only the fact that this one was clad in the flesh of a handsome Earthgirl had kept Harris from feeling his normal revulsion for all things Medlin.

  But now it surged forth at this revelation of her calm and callous biological “curiosity.” It was almost blasphemous for someone so lovely to speak so hideously.

  He wondered how far her callousness extended. If he made a move, would she gun him down?

  And how good was her aim?

  Probably too good, especially at point-blank range. He mastered his anger and said, “That’s a pretty cold-blooded way of thinking, Beth.”

  “Maybe. I’m sorry if my frankness offends you.”

  “I’ll bet you are.”

  She smiled at him and said in a gentler voice, “Let’s forget about that, shall we? There are a few things I want to tell you.”

  “Such as?”

  “For one: did you know that you’re fundamentally disloyal to the Darruui cause?”

  Harris laughed harshly, thinking with fierce nostalgia of his homeland.

  “You’re crazy!”

  “Afraid not. Listen to me, Abner, and see if I’m not telling the truth. You’re desperately homesick for Darruu, aren’t you?”

  “Admitted.”

  “You never wanted to come here in the first place, but the assignment was given to you, and you took it. You happened to have been born into a caste that has certain obligations of public service imposed on it, and you’re fulfilling those obligations. But you don’t really know very much about what it is you’re doing here on Earth, and for half a plugged unit you’d give the whole thing up and go back to Darruu on the next ship out.”

  “Very clever,” he said stonily, inwardly realizing the truth of her words, though refusing to let her see that. “Now give me my horoscope for the next six months,” he said in a tone of heavy sarcasm.

  “That’s easy enough. First, you’ll come to our headquarters and learn what my people hope to accomplish on Earth…”

  “I know that one already.”

  “You think you do,” she said smoothly. “But all you really know is what your own propaganda ministers have told you. Don’t interrupt. You’ll learn the real reason why we’re on Earth. Once you’ve come to see what that is, you’ll join us and help to protect Earth against the menace represented by Darruu.”

  He laughed. “I’ll turn against my own world?”

  “You will.”

  “And why, precisely, are you so sure that I’ll do all these incredible things?”

  “Because it’s in your personality makeup to do them,” she said. “You can’t help doing them, once the right motivation is supplied. Besides, you’re falling in love.”

  “With you?” Harris snapped. “Don’t flatter yourself, girl.”

  “I’m speaking objectively. I know your own mind better than you do.”

  “And you can stand there and tell me that I’m falling in love with a lot of fake female flesh plastered over a scrawny and repulsive Medlin body? Hah!”

  She remained calm, still wearing that serene smile, and not replying.

  Harris measured the distance between them, wondering whether she would use the weapon after all if he jumped at her. A disrupter broiled the neural tissue; if she got him in the brain or in any key part of the body, death would be instantaneous and fairly ghastly. Even a swiping shot across a limb would leave him crippled.

  He decided to risk it.

  He was a Servant of the Spirit, he reminded himself. He was here under certain obligations, as even the Medlin wench seemed to know. His assignment was to kill Medlins, not to let himself be killed by them. He had nothing to lose by making the attempt—and nothing but a scar on his soul to gain if he let her frighten him with that shiny little disruptor.

  In a soft voice he said, “You didn’t answer me, Beth—or whatever your name really is. Do you actually think I’d fall in love with something like you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Do Darruui and Medlins ever feel anything but hate for one another? Medlins are physically disgusting to all Darruui. You know that.”

  “Biologically we’re Earthers now, not Medlins or Darruui. It’s possible that there could be an attraction between us.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. “After all, I did ask you to cover your body so it wouldn’t distract me. And I reacted the same way to dancing girls in the night club with Carver.” He smiled and said, “I’m all confused. I need some time to think things over.”

  “Of course. You…”

  He sprang from the chair and covered the ten feet that separated them in two big bounds, expecting at any moment to feel the searing blast of the disruptor frying his nervous system. He stretched out one hand desperately to grab the wrist of the arm that held the disruptor.

  He succeeded in deflecting the weapon toward the ceiling. She did not even attempt to fire. He closed on her wrist, tightening until he could feel the delicate bones grinding against one another.

  “Drop it!” he grated.

  The tiny pistol dropped to the tiled floor. With a deft flick of his toe, Harris kicked the disruptor out of sight un-der the bed. Pressed against her, he stared into eyes blazing with anger.

  The anger melted suddenly into passion as their bodies pressed tight. Automatically he tensed as he saw the warm, beckoning look in her eyes. Then a surge of cautious fear went through him.

  She’s trying to trap me with her body, he thought. Taking advantage of these damned confused Earther sexdrives they built into me.

  He stepped back, not willing to have such close contact with her, afraid to let himself be lured.

  He reached for his own gun. She was too dangerous to be allowed to live, he thought. Beautiful as she was, it was safer, wiser, to kill her right now, while he had the chance to do it. She’s just a Medlin, he argued. A deadly one.

  He started to draw the weapon from his tunic. Suddenly she lifted her hand, moved it in a quick arc upward. There was the twinkling of something bright glittering between her fingers.

  She laughed.

  Then Harris recoiled, helpless, as the bolt of a stunner struck him in the face like a club against the back of his skull. She had moved fast, much too fast for him. He had hardly even seen the motion as she pulled the concealed weapon from its hiding place.

  She fired again.

  He struggled to get his gun out, but his muscles would not obey.

  He toppled forward, paralyzed.

  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 f
loor 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.

&nb
sp; “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.