Even as he watched, the ball slowed and stopped, hovering twenty feet above the asphalt.
"The air!" Reynolds suddenly screamed. "It's getting hard to breathe!"
"It'll get harder!" Tanner said grimly. "This will last for about half an hour. Slow your breathing and whatever you do, move slow. You move too fast and the air friction alone will set your clothes on fire!"
He swung slowly forward and brought the butt of his heat gun against the glass. Small cracks lanced through the window but it didn't break. Tanner pushed against it and the pieces slowly folded outwards.
"We're in the fast field, Martin—and so are they."
"They?"
"Avis and her men. The ones who caught you flat-footed under the ramp the other day. They're the ones who put up the field, who killed Clark."
Clark. Avis, Stan thought, could probably speed things up as well as slow them down. Clark was to have stayed home today, to wait for them. Avis and her men had waited until everybody but Clark had left, then they had turned on the field and aged the house and Clark by a hundred years in five minutes. It explained the skeleton, it explained the dust, it explained the crumbling cellophane and the yellowed curtains that powdered at the touch.
And the day on the ramp in Chicago. Avis had speeded things up, then. What had seemed to him to take half an hour, had actually occurred in minutes.
"How come we're not standing still like the others?"
"Neutralizers—they're built into your belt. If they weren't, you could have died a long time ago. Our own fields shield Reynolds."
He broke off.
"Here they come!"
Across the street, a figure darted from one parked car to another. A man suddenly ran behind the car that was poised on the corner. Stan could make out other figures moving behind the windows across the street.
There was the familiar spanging sound and a series of holes stitched themselves in the fragments of glass left in the window frame, three inches from his cheek. There was an impression of speed and heat and a crackling sound as the tiny projectiles thudded into the plaster behind him.
A pale, violet glow flashed out from Tanner's window and one of the figures on the street suddenly raised its hands in agony as flames crisped its clothing and burned its flesh. It staggered a few feet and finally fell in a flaming mass, its screams of agony splitting the still air.
Stan let his breath out slowly. He hadn't got a good look at the figure and for one brief moment he had thought it was ... Avis.
Which was an odd way to feel about a woman who would gladly slit his throat, he thought.
"One!" Tanner said grimly.
Stan flamed one of the automobiles and narrowly missed a small figure which scuttled out from behind it. He stole a look at Tanner. The man's face was flushed and shining, a half grin of expectancy was painted on it.
He himself did it as a duty, Stan thought soberly.
But Tanner enjoyed killing.
The spanging sounds sounded harder. Outside the window frames, Stan could see gouts of concrete and stucco being chiseled out of the walls. There was practically nothing left of the frames themselves but splinters of wood, held in place by small lumps of disintegrating mortar.
They were taking the house apart, he thought. They were dissecting it as casually as you would a frog, until the entire front part of the room would be exposed and there would then be no place to hide.
He turned up a notch on his heater and sprayed the other side of the street with a wide angle beam. There was an abrupt cessation of noise and then it started in again, louder than before. The small bedroom was becoming foggy with concrete and brick dust.
He caught sight of a figure moving behind the shrubs across the street and took careful aim. There was a sharp cry and then he had to dodge quickly back inside the window. Something had grazed his cheek, cutting it so a thin stream of blood angled down from the cheek bone.
He waited a second and stole another quick look out.
Two men had taken refuge behind some trees, further down the block. He took aim, then hesitated. The frozen figures of the two boys who had been playing catch were directly in the line of fire.
He tightened his finger, then sweat crept into the corners of his eyes and he blinked for a moment. He took aim again ... and wavered slightly. The sweat was heavier now and he could feel it soak the shirt on his back. Once more ... only apes....
"What are you waiting for?"
Stan calmly chose another target.
"The apes that are hiding—they won't stay there forever. They'll move someplace else and when they do, I'll get them."
Tanner laughed and aimed out the window. A moment later, two blazing torches had crumpled to the asphalt. Almost simultaneously, the trees went up in flames and two fiery figures stumbled out from behind them.
"Don't ever let your emotions interfere with your better judgment," Tanner said shortly. "Mr. Ainsworth wouldn't like it. Neither would I."
Stan hardly heard him. It didn't mean anything to him one way or the other, he kept telling himself. They were apes.
Just apes.
"What will the apes say when this is over and they discover the shattered houses and the bodies?"
Tanner picked off another running figure.
"There'll be no bodies. The wind disperses the ashes as soon as the field is let up. As for the rest—the apes are ingenious in thinking up explanations. They never believe in anything they haven't seen themselves."
The room was thick with dust and the noise of the spanging; the front wall was holed in half a dozen different spots. Then there was a rush of figures across the street and Stan caught his breath. In the lead was Avis, black hair streaming, urging the others on....
Tanner suddenly ran to the back of the room and pushed the bureau and the bed over by the front wall. He stripped the closet and piled the clothes by the furniture.
There was a lull in the spanging and a quiet sobbing suddenly filled the room. Stan turned.
Reynolds had collapsed in a corner, half out of his mind with fear. Tears straggled down the big man's face and sobbing convulsed his chest.
Tanner gestured to the front wall. "Get over there, Reynolds!"
The frightened man half crawled, half stumbled over to the tumbled furniture.
"You wanted an explanation, didn't you?" Tanner asked sharply.
Stan knew what was coming. Reynolds had ended up by knowing too much. Which was just too bad for Reynolds.
Reynolds' frightened babbling gradually made sense.
"Get me out of here, Mr. Tanner! Please get me out of here...."
"Gladly," Tanner said grimly. He brought up the heater and a violet beam danced over the crouching man and the bureau and the piled clothing. There was a short, pitiful screaming and then flames shot high into the room and billows of smoke curled casually through the broken windows.
Something inside Stan felt sick and he cursed himself for his own weakness.
"Get the suitcase and let's go, Martin."
The suitcase.
It wasn't there. While they had been busy at the windows, Stan thought, somebody had stolen the case. Reynolds hadn't even seen them and even if he had—the ape was now beyond questioning.
"It's gone?" Tanner laughed. "Avis is an amateur, Martin. And a bungling amateur at that! She could have killed us again and instead she preferred the case! One call to Ainsworth and we'll replace that tomorrow!"
They were feeling their way down the back stairs when the thick feeling to the air disappeared. Suddenly the street was filled with screams as passersby noticed the instantaneously ruined house and the burning cars and the suspicious mounds of ashes that swirled up into the morning air.
A block away, Stan stopped and wiped the sweat and soot from his face. Tanner looked at him sharply. "Something wrong?"
"Yes, there's something wrong!" Stan swung around and grabbed Tanner by the lapels, crossing his hands so the cloth was drawn tight around Tanner's throat and his knuckles dug into the flesh.
"I haven't been getting the answers," he said in a thin voice. "The girl's no ape—she knows too much, her weapons are too far advanced, her men are too well organized!" His voice started to shake with nervous reaction. "I'm supposed to be running the operation down here and I don't even know what's going on!"
"The answers should have occurred to you," Tanner said, his face a mask. "We're not the only ones who want this planet, Martin!"
Not the only ones! Stan relaxed his grip and let his arms hang limply at his side.
"Avis is an Aurelian," Tanner went on. "Her system and ours have fought many bloody battles for this planet. We're still fighting them—down here, now." He paused. "You haven't been told everything—operators are fed knowledge bit by bit, when they can fit it in. As a Thuscan agent, Martin, you're told just as much as the high command thinks necessary!"
His voice softened, became more persuasive. "We kill but not blindly, Stan. This is an important war—it's a war for an entire planet. We have to be brutal but the stakes are high. We're fighting to capture this planet for our own ... flesh and blood."
"I'm sorry," Stan whispered. "Forget what I did."
He wouldn't make the same mistake again, he thought. He'd do what he was told and he wouldn't forget that Avis and all of her kind were his implacable enemies, the enemies of his people.
But there was still something that bothered him.
In talking to him, Tanner had sounded like somebody he had heard once before....
CHAPTER IX
The nightmares started in Beirut. Stan's apartment was a modern one, just a block from the American University. He had opened the wood-slat Venetian blinds and had gone to bed, feeling dead tired. It was late August and things had not gone too well. Agents had disappeared. Fusion packages had disappeared from their hiding places.
But worries could not compete with physical exhaustion. He was asleep as soon as he hit the pillow.
The nightmares were terrifying. He was no longer Stanley Martin, patriotic agent for the planet Thusca. He was 17 years old once more, playing in the city streets of Chicago and fighting in a pillow fight with his older brother and running errands for his mother or watching her while she made meat loaf and took loaves of freshly baked bread from the ovens.
And then there was the smell of printing ink on freshly printed papers and reporters yelling "Copy boy!" at him and the twice weekly trips to the stockyards to pick up the live-stock reports.
The stockyards. He had stopped by an alley one morning and three men had jumped him, slugging him in the stomach and kidneys and hitting ... hitting ... hitting....
He woke up, shaking. His pajamas and the bed sheets were soaked with perspiration. He sat on the edge of the bed and held his head in his hands.
He had dreamt that he was an ape.
He got up and went to the bathroom for a glass of water. He didn't go back to sleep.
The nightmare the next night was different. Once again he saw two small French boys playing in the street. One moment, thin, bandy-legged kids in short pants and berets ... the next, two blazing torches that crumpled silently to the asphalt.
And then there was the hideous, horribly shrill screaming of Reynolds when Tanner had played the heat gun over him. The terrible screaming that Stan knew would haunt him for years....
He woke up again, rolled to the side of the bed, and was sick.
The nightmares, the goddamned nightmares.... He fumbled for matches and cigarettes on the bed table. The tiny flame of the match shook nervously in the gloom of the bedroom.
Hehadto stop them, if it meant dosing himself with drugs before he went to bed. He couldn't stand the dreams, he couldn't take the false memories that kept cropping up.
The next night he made up his mind. There were pieces still missing from the puzzle of who he was. There were things, he felt sure, that Tanner had never told him. Things, no doubt, that the high command had felt he wasn't ready to know yet.
A good agent wouldn't question higher authority, he thought slowly, sweating. But hehadto know them! He had to know the answers, he had to know about his first 25 years of life.
And there was one person who might be able to give him some information. One person who had once called him a traitor, who had implied he was a renegade and had been conditioned. One person who knew things about himself that he didn't.
The girl, Avis.
Eventually, he had to find her—to kill her. But right now, he wanted to find her to get information.
He got dressed, set the dial of the transport-hoop for London and stepped through. Tanner was waiting for him on the other side.
"Where is she?" Stan asked.
Tanner raised his eyebrows. "The North American continent. Chicago."
"Exactly where?"
"I don't know ... exactly. We've been trying to trace the radiations from the fusion package but it keeps moving about the city." Tanner grimaced. "We haven't been successful in following it. We've lost quite a number of agents trying to follow it, as you know."
He stood up and fished in his pocket for a pipe and a small pouch of tobacco. He looked very casual, very urbane, Stan thought.
"You going after her, Martin?"
"That's right—I'm going after her."
Tanner studied him curiously.
"You're taking a risk. Our agents will locate her sooner or later."
"They haven't so far," Stan said sarcastically. "Why leave it to chance?"
Tanner shrugged. "Good luck." Then he added seriously: "Don't talk to her, Martin. Don't give her a chance to pull something. Kill her on sight."
"I'll do that," Stan lied. He checked his heat gun, then worked the dial on the hoop once more and stepped through the shining oval....
... onto a street on Chicago's south side, a few doors down from the Hyde Park theatre. He walked into a nearby drug store and made a phone call, then walked back to the corner to wait. A moment later, one of his chief lieutenants, Caldwell, drove up.
"We lost Jones and Hagerty, Mr. Martin—just a few hours ago. I was making up a report on them when you called."
"You got the indicator?"
The man held out a small gadget that looked a little like a light meter. Stan swung it around experimentally. A small light mounted on it flickered briefly. He swung it back again and the light glowed, went out, and then glowed strongly again.
"You know, I don't see how you trace a person with that," Caldwell said, curious. "How does it work?"
There were a lot of things that Caldwell didn't know, Stan thought. He didn't know that the deal was anything more than a smuggling operation, he didn't realize that this was not a gang war but was one for much higher stakes but if his curiosity kept up, some day he would stumble on the truth.
Which would be rather fatal for Mr. Caldwell.
"You're paid for what you do, Caldwell, not for being curious."
"Okay, okay—I just asked."
Stan slid into the back seat. "Let's go."
Caldwell threw the car in gear and they drove silently north through the crowded streets. The light on the small indicator waxed and waned and grew steadily brighter as the faint radiation from the fusion material increased.
"You don't want to get too close," Caldwell said suddenly. "That's what happened to the other boys. They got too close and then they were ambushed."
The indicator light slowly increased in brilliance, then started to die again. They were about three blocks away, Stan thought, passing it at right angles.
"Okay, Caldwell, let me out here."
"You sure you won't need help, Mr. Martin? I could get some of the boys...."
"Wait on the corner. If I'm not back in an hour, then notify Tanner. He'll know what to do."
He got out of the car, palming the indicator in his hand. Avis—or at least the package—was somewhere in the area.
He glanced at the indicator and started walking, stopping occasionally to look in a store window and steal another look at the indicator. A block and a half down. One door, two doors....
And back one.
An office building. The usual miscellany—dentists and doctors and small professional firms.
He walked in, his eyes documenting everybody in the lobby. Any two or three of the men idling in the lobby could be her men, he thought.
And if any one of them had made a false movement, there would have been a sudden massacre.
"Top floor, please."
The elevator crept slowly up and let him out on the fifth floor.
The reaction on the indicator was strong. He went down to the fourth floor where it was stronger, then down to the third.
The second floor and the light dimmed slightly. It was the third floor then.
He walked quietly back up the stairs and paused at the landing, listening. There were no sounds of anyone in the corridor. He walked casually down it. A doctor's office, a dentist's office, a hairdresser's, and an employment agency.
The employment agency, he thought sharply. The perfect front, the perfect cover.
The perfect way to recruit agents.
He stopped quietly outside and unlimbered his heat gun from its shoulder holster. He turned the knob and walked in.
And was suddenly aware that all noise had stopped, the air was heavy, and the dust motes in the stream of sunlight that lanced through the window were perfectly still.
"You took a long time getting here, Martin."
She was standing in front of her desk, looking exactly as when he had seen her on the ramp in Chicago and on the street in the Paris suburb. A tall woman, a little on the thin side. Thick black hair that hung loosely about her face, making a frame for a pale skin and cold, green eyes. It was a hard, capable face with just a suggestion that at another time and another place, it might have been a beautiful face.
Now.... A drawn face, with a tinge of sadness to it.
Stan leveled his heat gun. She didn't move a muscle but patiently waited for him to press the stud.
Don't talk to her, Tanner had said. Kill her on sight. But he hadn't come to kill her. Not yet. Not before he found out some information.
He lowered his arm.
"Don't tell me you've finally gotten sick of killing people," she said quietly.
"No doubt it runs into hundreds," Stan said sarcastically. "I suppose any day now the apes will be getting suspicious."
She shook her head, bitterly. "Not—they won't. It happens all the time. People die in lonely little rooms, people have accidents, people commit suicide. Or so the Terrans think. They never seem to look beyond."
"You forget," Stan pointed out. "We've lost men, too. And I'm sure that not all of them died from natural causes."
"Who have you lost, Martin? Thieves, dope peddlers, murderers, and worse? And what have I lost? Patriots, scientists, statesmen—the few who understand and believe and are willing to work with me."
Stan shrugged impatiently. "You said I had taken a long time in getting here. I suppose you planned it that way."
She looked surprised. "Why else do you think we stole the fusion packages? Just to keep you from replacing them? The Thuscans can supply you with all the packages you need. We wanted to give you something by which you could trace me."
"It's a wonder you weren't killed before this."
A half smile broke the granite lines of her face. "Nobody but you would have gotten this far, Martin."
"So you got me here. What do you want?"
She looked at him thoughtfully for a full minute, weighing him.
"I want you to change sides, Martin. I want you to help us."
He stared at her in disbelief. "You must have known I wouldn't agree—even before you asked me."
"We need your help," she said steadily.
"You're doing all right."
"We're losing," she said, her face looking even more pale. "We've lost close to three hundred agents and we've located only ten fusion packages. I don't know your exact time table but I know it's sometime in November. It's late August now." Her face twisted. "We haven't got a chance, and you know it!"
"That's right," he agreed. "You haven't got a chance. What do you want me to do? Sell out?"
"You've already sold once," she said brutally.
There was that hint again, he thought sharply. The hint that she knew something about himself that he didn't. Or at least, she thought she did.
"Why should I sell out to a group of aliens?" he asked curiously.
"Because we're not a group of aliens," she said calmly. "Because this planet isourplanet, everybody on it is an Aurelian. And so are you!"
"You expect me to believe that?"
"It's true!" she blazed. "But you've been conditioned! You believe everything the Thuscans tell you and you've never questioned it. Now it's time somebody told you the truth!"
She leaned closer to him and he caught a trace of faint perfume. "This whole world could go up in smoke, Martin, and it actually wouldn't be important. Not to the Thuscans and not to my own people. You know why? Because it's a sidelight! An unimportant little skirmish in a battle your mind couldn't even conceive of!"
"You're lying," he said, without conviction.
She walked to the window and gestured outside.
"This Earth—it's not the home of the human race, Martin. It's a colony planet—colonized thousands of years ago, like a hundred other systems. For the last fifty thousand years, Aurelia has expanded throughout the galaxy. We don't keep contact with all the planets we've colonized—we can't. Our mission was to sow the human race far and wide and let them develope as they would.
"That was a mistake." She walked back to the desk. "Eventually we ran into the Thuscans—your so-beloved friends, Martin! They were expanding too, towards us. We had to fall back to try and defend our primitive little colony planets. And that wasn't easy. It wasn't easy at all."
Her face clouded and the look of sadness deepened.
"We had been peaceful for too long. And we weren't professional militarists. And we were so few. So pitifully few! The most we could hope to do was to combat the Thuscan system of infiltration, and then try to convince each planet of its own peril, so they could look to their own defenses."
Stan sneered. "You haven't been successful, have you?"
"What do you think would happen if we showed ourselves and set down a ship?" she asked curtly. "Most of the planets would be paralyzed with terror! They'd consider us suspect and they would hate us because we were more advanced. I do what I can. I try to convince a few. And when I do, they usually try to help." She looked at him again and her face was sheer hate. "Patriotic men, Martin—men that you've helped to slaughter!"
For a fraction of a second, she looked like she was going to break down. Then her face hardened again. Her voice was husky.
"I've manned the barricades on a thousand different planets, Martin! I've fought the Thuscans for as long as I can remember. Sometimes I've succeeded, more often I've failed. And when I've failed, I've had to run away." Her voice changed to steel. "But I'm not running anymore. If I lose, I'm staying here."
"You picked the wrong person to give a speech to," Stan said coldly. He started for the door and then stopped. "You said I was an Aurelian, a human being. What did you mean by that?"
"You were born in this city 25 years ago," she said in a low voice. "You worked here, your family lived here. You had a mother and a brother named Larry. You were ... exceptional. All the indications are, that you would have made a great man. You loved the world and the people in it. When you were seventeen, you were kidnapped by the Thuscans and conditioned to what you are now. They intentionally made you lose your memory, so that you would have no memories and no will—no will but theirs."
"I don't believe you," he said heavily.
"You don't want to." She paused. "You better leave, Martin. You better go back to the marionette makers and the string pullers."
He took one last look, realizing that something inside him was struggling to give the girl comfort, to say something that might help her. Then he shrugged and walked out the door.
He was two blocks away before he realized that both he and the girl could have killed each other at almost any time.
But neither of them had made any attempt to.
CHAPTER X
He was two men, after the meeting with the girl, Stanley Martin, the loyal Thuscan agent who continued to mastermind the betrayal of a world.
And Stanley Martin, the man who wondered at and was repelled by his own action. The man to whom the city of Chicago was strangely familiar. The man who distrusted Tanner and who knew there was a reason for it. The man in whose mind small bits of memory kept bobbing to the surface, like a ship that was breaking up beneath the sea and planks and spars kept rising to the top.
He also knew that that way lay ... madness. Two minds could not continue to dwell in the same body. He could not continually war with himself. The weaker, the fainter of the two would have to die.
Which meant that the person who had brought his weaker memory to the surface would have to die.
Avis was slated for death.
He worked at it consciously and carefully. One of the fusion packages was planted in a small store in Chicago, near the intersection of 63rd and Halsted. One of Avis' agents tried to pick it up and was killed. Two more tried the next day—and failed.
The word filtered out that the package was a special package, that its importance overshadowed that of other fusion packages. But no more agents tried for it.
By the end of October, opposition had apparently dwindled and faded. Avis had vanished from sight. There were reports that she had been seen in Stockholm and once that she had been glimpsed in a Moscow suburb. Then the reports ceased entirely.
Stan was not deceived. Avis would try once more, he thought. She would try for the package in Chicago. So he prepared for her, for the final ambush.
The 31st of October, agents were reported filtering down to the intersection and Stan decided to step in personally.
He stepped out of the circle of shimmering light in an alley near 63rd street. Nobody noticed him at all. People were streaming past him, racing through the alley to get away from the intersection. Stan grabbed a man running past him.
"What's going on?"
The man was sweating with fear, his eyes rolling wildly.
"Christ, Mister, don't go out there! They got guns that shoot flames and there's fifty people lying dead in the intersection! All in a minute, I'm walking past on my way to Sears and all of a sudden the streets are loaded with corpses!"
Stan let him go and raced up the alleyway. He could hear the quiet, singing noises of the heat guns and the rapid, spanging gunfire of Avis' men. She had come out in the open, trying desperately to convince the apes that they were threatened by alien groups. She had turned off the time projector halfway through the battle and it must have seemed like carnage had sprung up instantaneously.
There were at least two dozen crumpled figures lying on the pavement near the intersection. Some were crisped to near ash and others had been blasted with the spanging pellets. Two cars were blazing furiously and the windows in Sears and Wieboldt's had been shattered.
A pellet whizzed past his ear and he ducked low, glancing swiftly around the intersection. A thin, violet beam was playing from a doorway in Sears and he dodged towards it, ignoring the other spanging projectiles that ripped through the air and caromed off the building walls behind him.
Tanner was in the doorway, nursing a bleeding shoulder, his face glowing with the joys of battle.
"Tanner, what happened?"
"She's playing it in the open," Tanner snarled. "She's trying to convince the apes that way!"
She might succeed, Stan thought slowly, but it was more likely that the apes would blame it on a gang war of some kind. They wouldn't believe the truth. They wouldn't want to.
Tanner pointed down the street a block. "Cover it down there and we'll try to drive them towards you!"
Stan raced down half a dozen doors, then suddenly stiffened. There was the wail of sirens. And then the heavy chatter of a machine gun and the drifting choking of tear gas.
The spanging sounds and the violet beams suddenly stilled and figures slipped quietly from the buildings towards the side streets. Stan hesitated and then started running, away from the intersection.
He collided with Avis when she darted from a doorway. The granite face had broken and tears were streaking down it. Before he realized it, he was holding her tightly around the shoulders while she sobbed into his chest.
He had been fooling himself all along, he suddenly knew. He couldn't kill her. He couldn't come anywhere near to it.
He didn't want to.
"In every game," he said quietly, "there has to be a side that wins and a side that loses."
Her sobs broke off and she looked up at him, shaking her head to clear the hair from her face.
"I'm not crying because I've lost," she said quietly. "I'm crying because ... a brave man is dying! Because so many brave men have died!" She paused and the lines of weariness etched themselves back into her face. "I should have told you, Stan. I should have told you long ago. Maybe it might have helped."
She pointed to the intersection. "He won't ... last long. Go out and say good-bye."
He stared back at the intersection. It was quiet now, powdered concrete dust settling slowly out of the air. Police were circling among the quiet forms lying on the pavement while curious onlookers began to form a ring around the corner.
He walked quietly back to the street.
"Over here, Stan." The voice was faint. "You better ... hurry!"
A figure was slumped by one of the cars, its whole left side a singed and blackened mass of ash.
Stan walked over to him. The man coughed and spewed a gout of red over the front of him. "We always wondered what had happened, Stan ... Mom and me. And then Avis found me and told me you had sold out." The low hacking cough again and a spasmodic heaving of the chest. "N ... never believed it. You weren't the type." His eyes closed in brief pain. "Told her that a hundred ... a thousand times, I guess." He paused for a moment and Stan thought he was gone. Then the eyes flickered open.
"I was g-gonna break the whole story in tomorrow's editions. Guess ... your man got wind of it."
Stan couldn't bring himself to look down at the left side where the clothing was burned and where half of the waist was carbonized. He knew Tanner's work with the heater and he knew how well the man liked to see his victims squirm.
The cough started in again and suddenly the man was sitting up, his face twisted with pain and tears. "Y-you don't even remember me! Y-you d-don't even remember your own damned brother!"
And just before he died he said: "I'm s-sorry, Stan. God bless...."
And then he was gone and Stan knew that the man he was holding was nothing more than dead clay. He crouched there, his face wet, and the bits and tiny pieces of personality that had once been Stanley Martin coalesced and recombined into the individual they had been eight years before.
He stood up, the tears streaming down his face, and looked down at his brother Larry. A flood of memories were surging back. The games they had played, the arguments they had had, the way they had stuck up for each other....
And he could remember that morning when he had been slugged and the Thuscans had picked him up. Mr. Malcolm and Mr. Ainsworth and Tanner and the knives and the machines that had broken his spirit.
Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. A policeman had his notebook out and was looking at him curiously.
"You knew this man?"
"Once," Stan said slowly. "A long, long time ago."
He turned and walked up the street.
"Hey, you can't go! We need your help for questioning!"
He had more important business, Stan thought. With Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm.
And his fellow renegade, Tanner.
Avis was waiting for him in the alley, standing in the shadows by the circle of whirling black. Her face wasn't the collection of hard planes and angles it usually was and he realized dimly there was a beauty about her he had never appreciated before. A beauty and a certain sympathy....
He stood helplessly and looked at her. There was nothing he could say.
There was nothingtosay. He had betrayed his world and she knew it.
"It's not too late," she said quietly.
He shook his head. "It's all over but the gloating." He felt himself start to shake. "My God, I've condemned a world to death!"
"You can stop it."
"There's no time!"
"There's four days."
Four days, he thought wildly. Four days in which to recover fifty fusion packages hidden in cities that circled the globe. Four days in which he had to baffle his own agents ... and Tanner.
"I'm only one man, Avis. I could try—but I wouldn't make it!"
"If you want help," she said, "all you have to do is ask."
She still had her own organization, Stan thought. It wasn't as large as his own but its members were willing to die for a cause and they were brave and courageous. They didn't have the advantage of the transport-hoops, but then they were already spread out around the globe. It would be easy for Avis to communicate with them.
All he had to do was to give her the locations. And then, between himself and her agents....
It might be possible at that.
"All right," he said grimly. "Let's try it." He checked his heat gun and the two of them stepped through the shimmering haze....
... into the apartment in Bristol. He cautioned Avis to be quiet, and then opened the door silently into the living room. Tanner wasn't there but his lieutenant, Langerman, was. A small, wiry man with a rodent's face and sliding eyes who preferred looking at the small of a man's back rather than looking him straight in the eyes.
It had been necessary for Tanner and he to include one man in their confidence, one man who would hold down the fort in Bristol and watch the panels that marked the location of the fifty fusion packages and the agents.
Langerman was sitting by the fusion package panel, reading a newspaper.
He looked up when Stan stepped into the room. "How's it going, boss?"
"It's going all right," Stan said casually. He reached into his pocket for some money. "How about going down to the corner and having some lunch sent up? Anything that looks good."
Langerman grabbed the coin, shrugged, and sauntered towards the door. "Sure thing. Sandwiches and tea."
As soon as he was gone, Stan motioned Avis into the room and started writing down the exact locations of the fusion packages. Suddenly there was a voice behind him.
"Hey, what's going on? How'd the chick get in?"
Langerman had come back, his shirt faintly spattered with rain drops. He had gotten as far as the front door, Stan thought, discovered the state of the weather, and come back for a rain coat.
Nothing was going right....
It was too late for explanations. Langerman's hand had snaked beneath his suit coat and come out with a small pistol.
"Tanner would like to hear about this," he said, his eyes narrow.
He should have thought of that long ago, Stan thought coldly. Tanner hadn't trusted him, never had. Tanner had watched him. And when Tanner wasn't around to do the watching, he had made sure that somebody else was.
He didn't argue. He straightened out and dove for Langerman's legs. There was a sharp report and a splintering sound behind him and then Langerman was down, frantically trying to hit Stan in the face with the pistol butt.
Stan rolled him violently against the wall and grabbed for the hand that held the pistol. He caught it and tried to force it back. The two arms wavered, then Langerman began to give a little, his arm moving slowly back.
A world was in the balance, Stan thought grimly, and with a surge of strength he had the pistol. He slashed at Langerman's head and the little man went limp.
He stood up and thrust the list into Avis' hand. "There it is—all fifty. I've marked the ones I'll try to work myself."
She took the list and started back to the whirling circle.
"We'll meet again?" he pleaded.
"Right here," she said calmly. "On November 4th."
He watched her disappear, then worked the dials for another destination and stepped through to the unknown.
He had four days, he thought, in which to save a world.
Four short days.
CHAPTER XI
The night clouds rolled across the steeples of Bristol and the muffled voice of a church clock somberly rolled across the city, striking the hour of ten. The hush of a chill autumn night lay across the city, mantling the fog that started to deepen in the city streets.
In a small apartment on Regent street, a box-like machine sat quietly in a corner, staring at the growing gloom with fifty red, unwinking eyes.
At five minutes after the hour, there was a flickering and then there were only forty-nine. By eleven o'clock, the eyes had been cut down to forty-six.
The evening of the first, there were only thirty-nine.
By the third, there was only a dozen. And every hour that went by saw another light wink out....
He stood in a Moscow subway station, watching the trains thunder past and keeping an eye on a trash can in a little niche near an elaborate mosaic of Malenkov. None of the comrades, he thought, would think of depositing litter near the mosaic of the leader and so the can had never been used.
And since the cleaners knew it was never used, there was no earthly reason why it should have to be disturbed and emptied. So the can sat there and had never been touched.
Except once.
For a moment the platform was deserted and Stan walked rapidly back to the can. A moment later he held the fusion package in his hand....
Somebody barked something at him and he looked up, startled.
A few yards away, there was a man in the uniform of the people's police. He could have been hiding for any one of a number of reasons, Stan thought. He could have been watching for petty thievery or perhaps there had been a drive against littering the platforms.
But it didn't matter why he was there. The point was he was asking questions in Russian and Stan couldn't answer him.
Another train roared in and people poured out of it, crowding together on the platform. Stan turned and darted for a washroom, breaking the wrappings on the fusion package as he ran. A moment later he had snapped the detonating wires and broken the delicate, clockwork mechanism and the almost infinitesimally small transceiver.
He threw the remains of the package under the wheels of the train at the same time a pistol shot roared above his head, chipping off some of the tile of the ceiling.
Then he had made it to the washroom door, passed his hand over a brass plaque, and darted through the circle of black that appeared into....
... a dark corner of a bazaar in Damascus.
The bazaar stretched down both sides of the street, terminating against a mosque at one end. There were small, open shops that sold copperware and incense burners and large metal dishes, ornately tooled. There were tables and boxes of elaborate mosaic work—tables with veneers of rare wood and inlaid with mother of pearl. There were small restaurants and notion stores and shops that displayed bolt after bolt of silk and brocade.
Stan watched the people wandering past, then brushed past a small native boy begging for coins, and walked into one of the silk shops.
"Yes, M'sieur?"
"You're holding a bolt of brocade for a Mr. Liebman. May I see it please?" Stan flashed a card.
The little clerk waddled to the back of the store and returned with a small bolt of silk. Stan reached for it but the small man held it back.
"You are Mr. Liebman?"
Stan was sweating. "I'm a friend of his."
"I'm sorry, M'sieur. I was told not to release this to anybody but Mr. Liebman."
The little man wanted to stand and argue while the world went up in flames, Stan thought. He pulled out his wallet and slid a five dollar bill across the counter.
"I don't think Mr. Liebman would want this quite as much as I would."
The little man was not convinced. "Perhaps not but...."
Stan thrust out the flat of his left hand and pushed the clerk back against the shelves. Bolts of cloth rippled down from them and Stan had to dig beneath them to get the one he wanted.
A moment to open the bolt and cut the wires of the package and then he was out in the street once more, the clerk's shrill, indignant screams echoing after him.
He raced to the end of the street, near the mosque, for the dark corner that looked a little too dark and a little too glossy and then....
... out again in a small street a block from the Vatican in Rome. It was early evening. Twelve more hours to go, he thought, for the last one. That wouldn't take long and he could double-check any that Avis' agents might have missed.
He hailed a taxi and sped out to the ruins of the old Forum. He waited until the taxi had left and then walked over to the column of Trajan—the tall, marble column that had been erected in order to commemorate the victories and the accomplishments of the old Roman emperor. He vaulted the low iron fence that surrounded the column and broke the lock on the door that led to an interior stairway.
The package was still in its niche at the top of the stairs. Stan tore at the wrappings and pulled, its teeth, then crushed the package in his hands. That was the end of....
There was the sound of racing footsteps up the winding stairwell.
He flattened himself against the wall until they came into view, then launched himself down the stairs, landing squarely on the chest of a burly man so they both rolled down the steep flight of stairs.
Tanner had finally gotten wind of what was going on, Stan thought sharply. But it was too late to do anything about it now. The invasion had been set, you couldn't stop a fleet once it rolled into motion. The overconfident Thuscans would land—to discover to their shocked surprise that there was organized resistance.
Mr. Ainsworth's "apes" wouldn't be a pushover....
"Bastarde...."
The burly man wasn't alone. There was another at the bottom of the stairs. Stan twisted his body, holding the first Italian in front of him. There was a pistol shot and the sound of a bullet smacking into solid flesh. The man whom Stan held screamed shrilly, his eyes flaring wide.
Then all three of them were down. Stan leaped for the door and slammed it after him. A moment later he was sprinting through the low midway of tumbled arches and forlorn columns of the glory that had once been Rome.
He caught another taxicab by the Colliseum, slipped the driver the contents of his wallet, and sagged against the cushions exhausted.
A shot shattered the rear window of the cab and he felt vainly in his coat pocket for his heater. It must have fallen out during the long fall down the flight of stairs, he thought. Which meant that he was defenseless.
He left the cab a few doors down from the alley and sprinted into the darkness, another shot whistling past his ear. He was almost up to the circle of shining black when the bullet plowed into the fleshy part of his back and he half stumbled, half fell into the pool of whirling blackness....
CHAPTER XII
"You didn't succeed, Martin. Come on—wake up so I can tell it to your face. You and the rest of the apes have lost forever!"
He stirred and gagged and then rolled on his side, feeling the pain from his shoulder lance through his body. There had been the shot and he had felt himself falling and then there had been a voice....
Tanner's voice.
His eyes jerked wide open and he sat up, wincing at another flash of pain.
"Finally awake, are you?"
He turned. Tanner was on the small pedestal that held the hoop, standing nonchalantly in front of the circle of whirling black.
"You'll be sorry you woke up, Martin. Frankly, I should think you would be wishing you were dead." He half smiled to himself. "There's knives in the kitchen, incidentally, in case you should want to do something about it. I imagine you have quite a guilt complex."
Stan whipped his head around to look at the small box-like machine that kept score of the fusion packages. Only one light was still lit.
The light for Chicago.
Tanner smiled lightly. "Don't think you've won just because there's only one light left. Fifty fusion packages was our safety factor. We actually only needed one."
Stan's face mirrored what he thought and Tanner read the look.
"That's right," he nodded. "Only one. We wanted to create panic and one will do that. When it goes off, that's all we need. The rest of the world will hear about it seconds later. And then the flight will be on." He paused. "You don't think that people—anywhere—are going to remain in their cities, do you? All the police, all the commissars in existence, couldn't make them do that. And then the air fleets will spring into action. One fleet because it demands vengeance, and the other because the only defense is a good offense, as the ape politicians are so fond of saying."
He shrugged. "You see? It really only takes one for disaster."
Stan gathered his muscles for one last lunge....
Tanner caught the movement and raised his eyebrows.
"You wouldn't want to do that, Martin. For one reason, I've got Avis. And for another, it would be too late. The blast went off ten seconds ago."
He waved and stepped into the blackness.
Stan reeled over to the set and dialed Chicago. The sheet of blackness formed, wavered, and then faded back to the edges of the hoop.
He had lost, Stan thought, dazed. The city he had been born and raised in was one with the drifting atoms of the air.
Tanner had won, completely. And Tanner had Avis.
Stan huddled in the center of the room, his mind a melee of flickering thoughts. Then a noise at the window caught his ear. The noise of doors slamming and the starting of a thousand automobiles and people running through the streets. He didn't bother to look—he knew what it was.
The exodus of a billion people from ten thousand towns and cities was on the way.
There was six hours to go before the start of the brief, abortive war. Six hours before the air fleets would arrive at their destination.
A day later the Thuscan fleet would settle from the skies to begin the mopping up operation, the operation that would change the face of a green, water world to a world that would be another colony planet for Thusca.
A world in which the human race would play no part.
And there was the matter of the girl....
The noise outside the street was a steady roar, now. The street was gorged with people on foot and on bicycles and in automobiles, fighting to get out of the city. He could hear screams and curses and over all, the faint crackle of flames.
In a few hours, the city would be a roaring inferno, he thought. There would be nobody left behind to put out the fires. And the scene would be duplicated a thousand times over before the sun went down.
And the next day there would be the final, terrible tempest when the Thuscans arrived. When humanity would go out in a short, confused struggle.
There was nothing left to do but prepare to die....
Then he thought again of Avis and knew there was one last, forlorn chance.
He raced back to the communications room and pressed the switches on the small television set with which he and Tanner used to communicate with Mr. Ainsworth on the Thuscan flag ship.
Avis had mentioned that her own fleet was standing by. A small fleet perhaps, but certainly not one without possibilities.
He waited a moment for the tubes to warm up, then dialed the frequency Avis had once mentioned. There was a pause and the screen grew bright. A face wavered on it for a moment and then grew steady. It was the face of a middle-aged man dressed in a dull blue uniform. His eyes looked like they had seen all there was to see of both heaven and hell.
Stan explained the situation urgently. The face nodded acceptance of what had happened.
"Can you get out of the city?"
The sounds outside were a steady roar now. Stan hesitated a moment, then said yes.
"We'll try to pick you up. Take the main artery out of the city to the small wooded park."
"What are you going to do?"
The lines in the man's face deepened. "Outside of pick you up, there's nothing we can do."
Stan flicked off the switch and started for the door. So there was nothing they could do. Nothing they could do to save a world or to save Avis.
Well, that remained to be seen.
He opened the street door and was almost swept into the tightly packed, fast moving throng. He stepped back into the doorway for a moment, letting the fighting, struggling mob sweep by. A father held a squawling baby high above his head. A woman was crying, hugging a small bundle of clothes to her as she struggled on. Suddenly she slipped and fainted and slid beneath the thousand feet of the mob. Stan didn't see her reappear.
He closed the door and ran to the back. The alley was crowded but not nearly so packed as the street.
Perhaps half an hour had passed since Tanner had appeared in the hoop, he thought. He had five and a half hours to go before the bombs started dropping.
His back pained him and he could feel the blood start to well where he had been shot. He grimaced and struggled on. A man next to him was lugging a small, portable radio and Stan could hear the frightened announcer reading off the government's mobilization orders and exhortations to remain calm.
They were useless, Stan thought bitterly. They could have no more effect on the tidal waves of humanity leaving its cities than Xerxes had on the ocean, when he had ordered it to be whipped. Humanity was leaving its huddling places and there was nothing that could stop them.
An hour later and he made two miles through the packed outskirts of the city. The crowd was thinning now and he thought he could make out the wooded sections of the park, not more than three or four blocks ahead. It couldn't be too much longer, he thought. He wasn't sure of how much more he could take....
His shirt was torn and the wound in his back was bleeding freely. Worse than that had been the sights he had seen on the way—women and children trampled underfoot, and the few neurotic souls who had given up and taken the short way out by leaping from windows.
It was slaughter, even without the war, he thought. Humanity was destroying itself in senseless panic. And then he was in the wooded area that had grown close to the city. He pushed through the brush and trees until he found a small clearing. The mass of people streamed past it, anxious to put miles between themselves and the buildings that so obviously spelled destruction.
He had waited for perhaps an hour when a small life boat rocket put down in the clearing. He looked at his watch before stepping aboard.
Time had narrowed to three hours.
CHAPTER XIII
The war rockets from Avis' home system of Aurelia stretched through space like a thin, red string. There were more than a hundred there, Stan thought, but he knew without asking that they were hopelessly outnumbered by the Thuscan ships.
The small rocket maneuvered over the lead ship—a hatch slid back—and the rocket settled slowly through the opening.
A moment later and Stan was in the main cabin, facing half a dozen tired looking men wearing the same dull blue uniform as the man on the screen. They were supposed to be fighting men, Stan thought, but they didn't look the part.
They looked more like frightened civilians who had been drafted.
The man Stan had seen on the screen introduced himself as Elal and smiled wryly.
"We're not the professionals you've associated with until lately, Martin. Fighting is something new for us. It will be a while before we achieve the hardened look of the warrior race."
His voice was soft and tired. The voice of a man who had lost his spirit, who had ceased to hope.
"What's the situation?" Stan asked.
Elal shrugged. "You should have been able to size it up quickly. We are outnumbered—about ten to one, I would say. We had been hoping until the last minute that perhaps Avis would succeed, that she would be able to prevent the subversion of the planet."
"Just what would that have accomplished?"
"You Terrans are not without the means of defense," Elal pointed out. "In many ways you may be backward and primitive but you have deadly weapons. And a planet, strongly organized for resistance, would be very difficult for the Thuscans to take over. They have never succeeded in storming one outright. They have always had to rely on infiltration."
"Your weapons aren't puny either," Stan said. "You have the time fields."
"They have limited application—they are good for only small fields and only for short times. And the Thuscans have neutralizers."
Another man, who looked oddly familiar, spoke up.
"What's happened to Avis?"
Her father, Stan guessed shrewdly.
"She was captured by Tanner."
There was a short silence and the men looked oddly helpless.
"Well, what are you going to do?" Stan burst out. "You're the only hope that's left!"
Elal shrugged. "What is there to do? We have you. Perhaps you will be of help, if you can remember much of Thusca. So far as we know, you are the only man who has been there and returned. Outside of...." And then he broke it off.
"You're going to leave the world go by default?" Stan asked coldly. "And Avis, too?"
The group of Aurelians looked annoyed. "What would you have us do?" Elal asked. "We gambled and we lost. We are outnumbered ten to one. And this is not the only world we have to worry about, Martin. There are a thousand others."
"And you'll be outnumbered at each one, won't you?" Stan asked grimly. "You'll be continually retreating but the odds will never get any better. As your ring of defenses collapses and allows you to concentrate more and more, the area the Thuscans have to concentrate on will be steadily getting smaller. You have to make a stand for it—why not here?"
"It wouldn't work. We would lose. And we're far too large a part of our total fleet to take the risk."
They wanted to give up because it looked bad on paper, Stan thought. They didn't want to see blood spilled, they didn't want to get their fingers dirty.
"Where's the Thuscan fleet?"
The young man at the controls worked the dials of a screen which lit up to a luminous black. There was the Earth at one end of the screen—a green globe the size of a basketball—and then the star-flecked, velvet sky.
Stan watched a small collection of brilliant lights move slowly across the screen. The operator pressed another button and that segment of the heavens suddenly leaped forward into the viewscreen. The collection of lights swiftly evolved into the glowing, rod-like ships of the Thuscans. They were arranged into a triangle, a large, reddish colored ship at the apex.
Mr. Ainsworth would be on that ship, Stan thought. Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm and maybe even Tanner.
It was ... logical that Tanner would be there. His work on Earth was done. And it was probable that Avis was on the ship with him. She would be valuable as a hostage.
He stared thoughtfully at the screen. It wasn't a neat triangle, it wasn't a really militaristic formation. The files of ships were a little straggly, as if their commanders weren't really expecting any opposition. From any quarter.
"We could go down," Stan said thoughtfully. "We could force the lead ship to land in Europe. It would be Exhibit A, it would stop the war. You would have time to make explanations and if I know the ... apes ... they wouldn't be such pushovers after that."
"You think it would succeed?" one of the men asked sarcastically.
"There's always the element of surprise," Stan said bitingly. "It's probably the last thing they would be expecting you to do." He paused. "You say that you are outnumbered and your weapons are not the best. Have you ever tried the oldest one of all—courage?"
There was a dead silence.
"You're being very inspirational," Elal said after a moment. "But I don't think you're being very practical."
Stan glanced around the compartment. The pilot was young. He looked expectant, and somewhat hopeful. He would be willing to dare, Stan thought. The others had never fought a war, they didn't know how.
Stan turned to the pilot. "Take it down—towards the lead ship in the Thuscan Fleet!"
"How do we know he's changed?" a voice bleated. "Maybe he's still in league with Thusca!"
Stan turned, the blue of a heat gun shining in his fist. "I have no time to argue—but it's not true." To the pilot: "Take it down!"
"You forget that I'm the leader here," Elal said quietly.
"You've abdicated your position," Stan said softly. "A leader is a man who can lead. You can't.Ican." His eyes blazed.
"We're going down!"
CHAPTER XIV
They plummeted through space, towards the lead ship in the Thuscan fleet that was circling ever closer to the planet below. Stan glanced at his watch. Barely an hour remained before the planet below would be fighting a hideous, futile battle.
Barely an hour left in which he had to accomplish the impossible.
"Look!" somebody shouted. "Look at the screen!"
Stan glanced at it briefly. There was the Thuscan fleet laid out below—much nearer now—and the small, flashing dot that represented his own craft.
Behind him, strung out like a lazy figure C, was the rest of the Aurelian fleet. They were following the leader down, even though they recognized the enormous odds at which they were going to be fighting.
Courage, Stan thought, feeling something catch in his throat. The unknown weapon.
But just how much could it accomplish?
"Contact in half a chrono," the pilot said.
Stan walked over to him.
"Show me how this works."
It was simple enough, Stan discovered. The firing studs for the different, directional rockets could be played like the keys of a piano. And the radar that indicated distance from another object was accurate to the yard.
Stan studied the pilot for a minute, trying to guess at his reflexes. "When we make contact, do exactly as I tell you."
He shifted his gaze to the viewscreen. The Thuscan fleet was much nearer now, but the formation was changing slightly. The triangle was more ragged, more uncertain looking. They weren't sure of what was going to happen, Stan thought, and they were worried.
Which was just what he wanted.
"You'll kill us all!" a voice behind him screamed.
"Maybe I will," Stan mused softly. "I don't promise you a thing!" They were brief miles away now.
"Fire left!"
The port rockets lifted the ship slightly and they flashed directly over the Thuscan lead rocket, a bare half mile beneath them. The wash from Stan's rockets flared lightly over the Thuscan ship and then they were pulling away.
"Try again."
The pilot turned the rocket in a circle and headed back. Beneath them, the lead Thuscan ship was belching flame and breaking out of formation, trying desperately to get away from the insane men who were bent on committing suicide.
Stan flashed them again, even closer. There was no place for the Thuscan ship to go but down.
Stan laughed outright and drove it like a dog herding sheep, hounding them too close for them to bring their weapons into play, and daring death every time he drove at them.
He was courting death and he knew it. And didn't care. The minutes were ticking slowly by and he knew that time was running out for half a billion people on the green globe below.
He glanced again at the viewscreen. Space was a tangle of flaring lights and rocket trails. But confused as the picture was, he knew one thing. Surprise and courage had been the elements they needed.
They were winning.
He turned to Elal. "Get the Thuscans on the viewscreen."
A moment later, the picture on the screen faded and another control cabin faded in. The creature in the picture recognized Stan and a moment later the sober face of Mr. Ainsworth was staring out at him.
"You shouldn't be doing this, Stan," Mr. Ainsworth said, his voice sounding bewildered and hurt. "Is this the way you pay back friendship? Is this how you repay hospitality?"
He could listen to the words and know they were lies. He could look at Mr. Ainsworth and know what lay beneath that saint's face. But he still wanted to believe. He wanted desperately to believe. To be told by Mr. Ainsworth that all was forgiven.
His throat was dry and he was dripping sweat. His conditioning wasn't going to disappear over-night, he knew. It would be a battle all the time. And this was just the first round.
"I'm going to force down your ship and kill you," he said quietly. "But first, we're going to play tag over every civilized capital on the globe. We're going to let them know just what the story is. And then, if the Thuscan fleet still wants to come in, they can go ahead and try it. But I wouldn't advise it, Ainsworth! The apes won't be easy pickings!"
He flicked off the set. They were in the atmosphere now and the air was screaming past the hull. He could feel the temperature inside the cabin rise and then the refrigeration went into action.
They rocketed over the ocean and then they were over London, a bare five miles up. The ships and their exhaust were clearly visible to the frightened millions camping outside the city.
Stan drove the Thuscans over Paris and Moscow and Tokyo and Washington, timing his rocket blasts and forcing them whichever way he wanted them to go. He threatened to crash them from above if they tried to leave, and threatened to ram them from below if they tried to land.