The Silent Invaders Page 6

  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.

  SIX

  A day of nerve-twisting inactivity passed, moment by endless moment.

  Harris did not hear from Carver, though he waited all morning for a message. Nor did any of the Medlins contact him. Toward midday, Harris went down the hall to Beth Baldwin’s room, but when he signalled no one answered the door.

  In the lobby, he checked at the desk. “I’d like to leave a message for Miss Baldwin,” he said.

  “What room is that, sir?”

  “5820.”

  The clerk checked the board. “I’m sorry, sir. That room was vacated earlier this day.”

  Harris drummed on the desktops with his fingertips, and noted in grim amusement that he was even acquiring the Terran gestures of irritation and impatience. “Did she leave a forwarding address?”

  Another check of the board.

  “No, sir, I’m sorry but she didn’t.”

  Harris sighed. “All right. Thanks anyway, I guess.”

  He walked away. It figured, he thought, that she would have severed all links this way. She had established quarters in the hotel only long enough to come into contact with him. Her mission accomplished, she had left without leaving a trace.

  Regretfully, Harris wished he had had a chance to try that biological experiment with her, after all. The thought struck him as faintly perverse, since she was a Medlin under the curving flesh. But, Medlin though she might be, his body was now Terran-oriented, his entire glandular system rearranged and modified, and it might have been an interesting experience.

  Well, there was no chance for that now. And just as well, he decided. Consorting with the enemy was a crime and a sin against the Spirit no matter what sort of bodies were being worn by whom.

  Wearily, he left the hotel, feeling the need for some fresh air and exercise. On Darruu it had been his custom to swim eight lengths every morning, winter or summer, red-mist or pinkmist. Here, in this concrete monster of a city, there was no chance for that, and his atrophying muscles ached from neglect.

  He walked instead.

  He walked down narrow streets two thousand years old, through winding alleyways that led down to the river, stinking and polluted, that wound through the core of the giant city. He stood at the river’s edge, on the paved embankment, looking out at the sluggishly flowing water rolling toward the sea. The sky was thick with helitaxis, not with sea-birds. The bustle of commerce was everywhere.

  This Earth was a rich world, he thought. A world of shopkeepers, of merchants, of financiers and thieves. There were no spiritual values here, not even a decent sense of military discipline. Earth was a curious mixture of the ruthless and the spineless, and Harris was at a loss to understand the culture.

  The river’s stink oppressed him. He turned away, gagging, and made his way back into the interior. Jostling robocarts thrummed by him on all sides. He was troubled by the swarming omnipresence of people, busy people. Nine billion people on a single world, and a small world at that—it was a numbing thought. And yet, he understood that there were still vast tracts of Earth where no one lived at all—open wastelands and jungle lands that still had not been developed, though settlements were beginning to nibble at their edges.

  The Earthers preferred to lump themselves together in huge cities, and to let the outlands rot. Why? Why these mind-blasting conurbations?

  Were they afraid to be alone?

  Harris shrugged. This world gave him a choking feeling. He would be well glad to be rid of it, to be back on Darruu again, to see an open field and to smell clean air, to revel in the tang of cold water against his naked skin in the hours after
dawn.

  He passed a building so sleek its sides were mirrors of stone. His face, hardly distorted, peered back at him. Not his face, not Aar Khülom’s face, but Abner Harris’. He was starting to forget what he had looked like. Aar Khülom of the city of Helasz was a stranger to him now. He closed his eyes for a moment, saw his old face, red-eyed, golden-hued, hairless, with angular cheekbones jutting up harshly to cast his eyes into shadow.

  Someday he would have that face back, he told himself hopefully. They would strip away the pink overlay, remove the obscene mat of bestial hair that sprouted on it, rip out the cheek-padding that hid the knifelike blades of his cheekbones. The surgeons would restore his tendrils. They would no longer be functional ones, no longer would give him advance warning of changes in barometric pressure, but that had been a small enough sacrifice. A Servant of the Spirit must be prepared to yield up not merely his tendrils but his eyes, his heart, his life, even, if Darruu requests it of him. With the privileges of nobility come the obligations as well, and he had never questioned that.

  But he longed for Darruu.

  He longed for his own face.

  Carver is right, he thought. We must strike fast, wipe out the scheming Medlins. And then home! Home to Darruu!

  As the afternoon shadows began to gather, Harris returned to the hotel, and ate alone in the hotel restaurant. He found he had little appetite, and he ate simply, avoiding the more exotic aspects of the hotel’s menu. As a place that catered to a largely interstellar clientele, they featured delicacies from all corners of the universe—at least, all corners of the universe whre Terran tradesmen were active. There was nothing Darruui on the menu, nothing even from, a planet near Darruu, and Harris had no taste at the moment for dishes of other alien worlds.

  After eating, he returned to the room and lay down on his bed. Automatically, he assumed a Darruui position of comfort—on his back, legs in the air, knees flexed—but realizing that he might be under a spybeam, he caught himself and stretched out into a conventional Terran repose-position. He tried to relax.

  Toward evening, his signal-amplifier buzzed. Reaching across, he activated the communicator.

  “Harris here.”

  “Carver. Rendezvous time in one hour.”

  “Where?”

  “8963 Aragon Boulevard,” Carver said. “We meet on the eighth floor.”

  Harris repeated the address. Carver signalled off. Feeling a rising sense of exictement now that the long day of boredom had ended, Harris rose, dressed, armed himself, and went out.

  He hired a helitaxi, gave the driver the address. The driver squirmed around in his seat and said, “What’s that address again?”

  “Aragon Boulevard. 8963.”

  “Damned if I know where that is. Hold on and let me get computer direction.”

  Harris waited. It was an impossible city, he thought angrily. Imagine cab drivers unable to find their way around! The city was too big, of course, but that had nothing to do with the immediate problem. Why couldn’t they have a systematic arrangement of the streets? Hadn’t they heard of city planning on Earth? Didn’t they know what a street grid was? Why did they have to name their streets, instead of numbering them?

  An absurd planet, he thought.

  But, he realized, with all their inefficiencies and irrationalities, these Earthers had managed to forge outward into the galaxy at a faster pace than any other species in the history of sentience. That was a chilling thought. What, he wondered, would these people be capable of if they were actually funtioning at full efficiency?

  What would they be like when the new super-Earthmen evolved into domination?

  He began to shiver apprehensively. He cursed the Medlins anew. Had they no sense? Couldn’t they see what a menace they were spawning?

  The helitaxi lifted. Harris settled back, tried to calm himself. The situation was coming under control. In short order the Medlins would be eliminated, and then there would be nothing to fear from Earth and its new race.

  Aragon Boulevard, for all its grand-sounding name, turned out to be a crooked, dusty excuse for a street far to the east, at the edge of the river. There was not even a helitaxi ramp in sight, and the cabbie had to let him off in the middle of a plaza some blocks away.

  Harris trudged through gathering darkness toward the 8900 block, and found the building, shabby and old-fashioned, weatherbeaten and worn. There was no one on duty in the lobby. He simply walked in and made his way toward the gravshaft.

  He rode up eight stories in a creaking antique of a gravshaft that vibrated so badly he expected to be hurled back down at any moment, and made his way down a dusty, poorly-lit corridor to a peeling, frayed door that gave off the faint hiss and yellow glow that indicated the presence of a protection-field.

  Harris felt the gentle tingling in his stomach that told him he was getting a radionic scanning. He waited patiently.

  Finally the door opened.

  “Come in,” Carver said.

  Harris stepped inside. There were four others in the room, besides himself and the Darruui leader. Carver said, speaking carefully in Terran as though determined not to make use of his Darruui background in any way, “This is Major Abner Harris, gentlemen.”

  The other four introduced themselves in turn—a pudgy, balding man named Reynolds; a youthful, smiling one who called himself Tompkins; a short, cold-eyed man who gave his name as McDermott; and a lanky, lean fellow who introduced himself drawlingly as Patterson. As each of them in turn gave his name, he made the Darruui recognition signal, and Harris acknowledged it.

  “The other four of us are elsewhere in the eastern hemisphere of Earth,” Carver said. “But six should be enough to handle the situation.”

  Harris glanced at his five Darruui comrades. They looked run-of-the-mill, ordinary. Of the group, only he, with his crisp uniform and stiff military bearing, would seem capable to an outsider of being able to handle any kind of situation.

  But he knew that that was a superficial way of assessing their strength. These five had been designed to look unobtrusive and unheroic. Beneath their Terran exteriors, all five were Servants of the Spirit, and so reliable to the utmost in any crisis.

  “What are your plans?” Harris asked Carver.

  “As discussed yesterday. We’re going to attack the Medlins, of course. We’ll have to wipe them out at once, down to the last of them.”

  Harris nodded. But to his own surprise he felt troubled and dismayed. The image of Beth Baldwin, dead by his hand, crossed his mind. Frowning, he tried to clear his brain of such treacherous thoughts. But despite his earlier conviction of the need to destroy the Medlins, it seemed to him now that they had been strangely sincere in releasing him.

  He knew that that was preposterous. He dismissed the idea from his mind.

  “How will we wipe them out?” he asked.

  “They trust you,” Carver said. “You’re one of their agents now, as far as they know.”

  “Right.”

  “You’ll return to them and tell them you’ve disposed of me, as instructed, and are reporting for your next assignment. Only you’ll be bearing a subsonic on your body. We’ll implant it now. Once you’re inside the headquarters, you activate the subsonic and knock them out.”

  “And knock myself out as well?”

  “No,” Carver said. “You’ll be fully shielded.”

  “I see,” Harris said. “Then I’m supposed to… kill them when they’re unconscious?”

  “Exactly,” Carver said.

  The fat man, Reynolds, said slowly, “It would seem to me that there is a trace of reluctance on the Major’s face, yes?”

  Harris fought to get his rebellious features to wear a properly patriotic, dutiful expression.

  McDermott said, “Perhaps the Major has some lingering emotional feelings about one of the Medlins?”

  Harris flashed a furious look at him. Was he that transparent, he wondered? Could they all fathom him so easily?

  Carver said, �
�Is there anything troubling you, Major Harris?”

  “No.”

  “You’re completely willing to carry out the assignment?”

  “I am a Servant of the Spirit,” Harris said stiffly.

  Carver nodded. “So you are. I should not have questioned your motives even by implication.” There seemed to be more than a trace of mockery about his tone, Harris thought. Carver went on, “You know, you can’t be humane with Medlins, Harris. It’s axiomatic, I’d say. It’s like being humane with bloodsucking bats or with snakes.”

  Harris felt tremors running through his legs. Five pairs of Darruui eyes were fixed balefully on him.

  What are they thinking? Do they suspect me of something? Maybe they think I really have sold out to the Medlins!

  The Darruui called McDermott said, “We’ll wait outside the Medlin headquarters until we get the signal from you telling us that you’ve done the job. If you need any help, just let us know.”

  “How does the plan strike you?” Carver asked.

  Harris moistened his lips and tried to look soldierly. This sudden access of weakness troubled and bewildered him. He had never reacted this way before, even in much greater stress situations. “It sounds like it’ll work,” he said thinly. “It sounds all right.”

  “Very well,” Carver said curtly. “I’m glad you approve. Reynolds, insert the subsonic.”

  Harris watched impassively as the bald man produced a small metal pellet no larger than a tiny bead, from which three tantalum filaments projected. With his body already a mass of surgically implanted devices, Harris was stoically ready for one more.

  “Your trousers, Major…”

  Harris dropped them. Reynolds drew a scalpel from a case in his pocket, and, kneeling, lifted the flap of nerveless flesh on Harris’ left thigh that served as trapdoor to the network of devices underneath.

  Looking down curiously, Harris stared into the dark recesses of his own leg, eyeing the coiling hardware that lived there. Reynolds inserted two fingers and uncoiled a packet of wires.

  Harris winced, holding himself rigidly in check as a searing wave of hellish pain rocked him.