The Project Gutenberg eBook ofCosmic SaboteurThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Cosmic SaboteurAuthor: Frank M. RobinsonIllustrator: W. E. TerryRelease date: October 14, 2021 [eBook #66540]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COSMIC SABOTEUR ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Cosmic SaboteurAuthor: Frank M. RobinsonIllustrator: W. E. TerryRelease date: October 14, 2021 [eBook #66540]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Title: Cosmic Saboteur
Author: Frank M. RobinsonIllustrator: W. E. Terry
Author: Frank M. Robinson
Illustrator: W. E. Terry
Release date: October 14, 2021 [eBook #66540]Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COSMIC SABOTEUR ***
They told him he hated Earth, beating himuntil he nearly died—for he must be convinced!...It was all part of his indoctrination as a—Cosmic SaboteurBy Frank M. Robinson[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced fromImagination Stories of Science and FantasyFebruary 1955Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They told him he hated Earth, beating himuntil he nearly died—for he must be convinced!...It was all part of his indoctrination as a—
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced fromImagination Stories of Science and FantasyFebruary 1955Extensive research did not uncover any evidence thatthe U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They jumped him when he was walking past an alley, a couple of blocks from the stockyards on Chicago's brawling South Side.
He had gotten off the "El" two stops down because it was a damn fine Spring morning and he liked to walk through the Polish section and watch the city wake up. He was 17 years old and he hadn't grown cynical with the world yet. He liked the clean, fresh smell of the early morning and he got a kick out of the sleepy-eyed housewives in their ratty bathrobes, banging open the front door to bring in the milk and the morning paper.
He'd pick up the live-stock reports, he thought, hop an "El" back uptown and maybe he'd be at Amalgamated News Service only a couple of minutes late. And if they didn't like it, they knew what they could do about it. His kid brother ran copy at the News and he said they could use another boy down there.
"Stan," Larry had said, "you're wasting your time at AMS. You won't get as much dough at the News but you'll learn something."
Which was something to consider because Larry was one bright cookie and someday he was really going to be somebody....
It was early morning and nobody had started to work yet—the streets were deserted. There was a chill in the air and he stopped by an open alley to light a weed and take the clamminess out of his lungs.
And then he got it.
A handful of knuckles right in the mouth, splintering his teeth and splitting his lip so he sprayed blood like somebody had squeezed a sponge. It was hard to get a good look because the shock had filled his eyes with tears. But there were three of them and they were grown men and the biggest he had seen outside of a television wrestling match.
He screamed "Help!" just once before a hand as big as a typewriter buried itself wrist deep in his stomach. He doubled up and went limp, gasping for breath. One of the men caught him by the jacket collar and pulled him further into the alley, to the back of a restaurant where there was a small mountain of empty boxes and garbage cans full of orange peels and eggshells and stale doughnuts.
Nobody said a word.
He was still fighting for his breath and feeling sick when they stood him up against the refuse pile and started going over him scientifically, cutting his face and hitting him in the kidneys. He tried to blink away the blood that kept streaming into his eyes, to get a good look at them. But they kept working on his face until all the world was a bloody haze and it was hard to even make out light and shadow....
He lashed out once and heard a satisfying grunt and then somebody hit his wrists with a slat of wood, deadening the nerves so he couldn't close his hands. He tried to scream but he had no wind left and he realized dimly it wouldn't have done much good. The streets were deserted and it was the type of neighborhood where nobody went to anybody else's rescue—least of all, early in the morning.
A fist caught him flush on the side of the jaw and he staggered over against the garbage cans and fell to the bricks, his face half buried in the stinking garbage. He played dead dog for a moment, catching his breath, then scrambled to his knees, clawing handfuls of rotting orange peels and decayed bones to throw at the three silent men in front of him.
"You'll never get away with this! The cops...."
The toe of a shoe caught him in the groin and he collapsed again. He didn't even recognize the thin screaming that sounded in his ears as his own.
A voice from a million miles away said: "We're not supposed to kill him!" and he guessed that the men were from out of town because it was an accent that he had never heard before. Then two of them were holding him up, twisting his arms behind him, while the third stuffed garbage in his mouth, choking him so his screams died away to a dull, muffled sob.
They let him go for a minute and he tried to run away. They laughed and tripped him before he had taken three steps. Then they jerked him to his feet and started hitting him again, working him over professionally, chopping at him with fists covered by thin, leather gloves that cut his face and ripped his shirt and jacket.
When he finally slipped limply to the pavement, they let him lay there, kicking him in the thighs and the buttocks. His cap was a dozen feet away, the remnants of his jacket not too far from that. His pants were ripped and his shirt was in shreds, the strips waving like bloody banners in the slight, morning breeze.
One of the three said "I guess it's time to go." Stan could hear running feet and then there was a long silence. He couldn't tell if it was a minute or half an hour later when footsteps again sounded across the bricks and somebody knelt by his side.
"You're hurt, son! Let me help you...."
The voice was soft and full of compassion, like a minister's might be. The man helped him to his feet and Stan lurched to the street and sat down on the curbstone. He tried to wipe away the blood with a tattered shirt sleeve but it still seemed to be running down his cheeks. Then he realized that he was crying.
"Try this."
He felt something pressed into his hands and wiped at his face with the handkerchief.
"T-thanks."
"Who were they, son?"
"I don't know. I was just walking past the alley and they ... jumped me. I don't know why. Honest to God, Mister, I don't know why!"
He felt close to crying again and shut up for a moment to try and control the convulsive heaving of his chest. Then he looked up at the man standing next to him.
Black shoes, brand new. Neatly pressed gabardines. Tall and somewhat thin. Wearing a light, black topcoat like you might imagine a priest would wear. A tan hat, also brand new. Middle twenties, with the face of a saint. The face of a man you knew you could trust.
"What's your name, son?"
"Stan. Stanley Martin." He was still close to sobbing and the name came out with too many syllables.
The man pondered for a moment and Stan thought he looked a little like a high-school principal trying to guess how bright a student might be.
"We'll have to fix you up, Stan. Then we'll have to take you home." He helped Stan to his feet and guided him over to a black car a few yards down the street.
Far away, there was the wail of a siren.
"The cops," Stan said, hanging back. "I gotta tell the cops."
"There'll be time enough for that later," the man said smoothly. There was the faintest suggestion of haste in his voice.
"I oughtta wait," Stan mumbled, but the man pushed him gently into the car and Stan didn't argue. He lay down on the back seat, resting his throbbing head against the cushions and the side of the car. It was a big car, he thought vaguely. Like a rich man's sedan, with a glass partition between the driver and the passengers.
He heard a hissing sound from somewhere and the world started to gray out. And then he suddenly wondered how he could be taken home if the man didn't know where he lived....
Just before he blacked out altogether, a voice said:
"I'm your friend, Stan. Say it to yourself and say it over and over. I'm your friend. I saved your life."
"You're my friend," Stan repeated dully, his mind slipping slowly into a pool of throbbing blackness. "You saved my life...."
The last thing he saw was a quick glimpse of the city streets, the slowly rotting houses, and the bright splashes of green in the front lawns and the cottonwood trees.
CHAPTER II
His muscles were aching and sore and he felt sick to his stomach.
His eyes wouldn't focus at first and he stayed flat on his mattress and stared at the hazy outlines of the room. It was a funny kind of hospital. Nobody had bandaged his cuts—they were still caked with blood—and he still had on the same torn clothes that smelled of sweat and dirt.
Where had the man taken him?
He shook his head, trying to make out the details of the room, and his vision cleared a little.
The room didn't even come close to a hospital. It was more like a jail. There was the cot that he was sitting on and the washbasin and the flush bowl and the barred door at the entrance. Nothing else. No windows, no desk, no calendar, nothing. Just a small cell of gray, featureless metal.
He stood up, holding on to the cot for support, and touched the bars wonderingly. He hadn't done anything wrong, he thought. Not a damn thing!
"Guard! Guard!"
He'd get a lawyer! Larry had connections and maybe....
There were footsteps outside the cell door and a moment later it swung open. The man who opened it wasn't a guard—at least he didn't dress like one, Stan thought. Just a man in a blue suit. Smiling and urbane and what the ad writers would call dapper.
Except for his eyes. The same kind of cold eyes that an executioner might have. Eyes that had watched people die—slowly.
Stan shivered.
Death. In a blue serge suit.
"I was wondering when you were going to wake up," the man said pleasantly. He held out his hand. "My name's Fred Tanner. You...."
Stan didn't take the hand. "I want to know what's coming off here! Where's the joker who brought me here? Where's...."
"Somebody else can tell you all you want to know," the man said easily. "Just follow me."
Stan didn't move.
"You coming?"
It wasn't a question, it was a statement. Tanner stood there, his head half cocked, watching Stan curiously, like somebody might watch an ant or a bird. Stan started to say something but the words died in his throat. Tanner was no weakling. He had thick wrists and a bull neck and a feeling of power that he wore like a suit of clothes.
He was the type, Stan thought coldly, who could break you in two if he wanted.
He shrugged and followed Tanner down the corridor for a hundred feet and then into a room about the size of his own cell. There was an oval shaped desk in one corner and a tubular chair by it, both of the same metal as the walls and the floor. The whole assembly looked like it had been punched out of one sheet.
The man behind the desk looked like an ex-football player ten years later, Stan thought. A husky man, just starting to go to fat, with thick lips and thinning hair.
Tanner pushed Stan forward. "Here's the boy, Mr. Malcolm."
Stan wet his lips. "I ... I'd like to know what this is all about, sir."
"Fred," the man behind the desk said in a bored voice. "He lacks manners."
Tanner casually lashed out with the flat of his hand and caught Stan on the side of the head—hard. Stan staggered against the wall and half-slid to the floor. He could feel the tears start again.
"Hey! What's the...."
"Again, Fred."
Stan crumpled to the floor, shook his head, and struggled back to his feet. He was dazed but he knew enough not to say anything.
"What's your name?"
"Stanley Martin. I told...."
"Fred."
The blow rocked him but he managed to keep his feet. His legs felt like water.
"How many of your family are living, Martin?"
"Just my mother." He licked his cracked lips. "And my brother. That's all."
"You've lived in Chicago all your life?"
"Yes ... yes, sir."
Mr. Malcolm finally put down the reports he had been reading and looked up at him. If Tanner's eyes had been cold, Stan thought, then Mr. Malcolm's eyes were frozen.
"You don't like Chicago, do you?"
"I ... I guess I like it well enough."
"No, you don't," Mr. Malcolm said smoothly. "You told the other copy boys you hated the city and as soon as you could, you were going to leave it."
Stan gaped. "How did you know?"
"We know a lot of things." Mr. Malcolm leaned casually back in his chair, inspecting Stan like he would a butterfly on a pin. "We know that you hate your mother. And your brother."
"Where do you get that stuff?" Stan bleated, his voice rising. "What are you trying to prove?"
"Fred. Again."
Tanner had to help Stan up.
"I'm going to be sick," Stan said faintly.
The man behind the desk ignored him. "Your mother used to take a strap to you when you came home late, Martin. She used to accuse you of stealing in the stores."
Lies, Stan thought. But he didn't dare talk back.
"Your brother, Larry. He was always your mother's favorite, wasn't he? She always did a lot of things for him that she never did for you, didn't she?"
"Larry never...!"
"Fred."
"I'm sick," Stan whimpered. "Honest to God, I'm sick!"
"You hate the city," Mr. Malcolm repeated coldly. "You hate your family."
"I think you're crazy," Stan said weakly. "I want a lawyer."
Mr. Malcolm turned back to his reports.
"Take him to the other cell, Fred."
Back to a cell, Stan thought weakly, following Tanner out. Where at least he could lie down....
But the other cell was too small to lie down in. It measured two feet square and there was no room to lie down. Or even sit down. The most he could do was lean.
He touched the wall with his hand and screamed with pain. The walls were wired for electricity, a thin strip of insulation separating them from the floor. He couldn't lie down, he thought. He didn't have room to sit down and he couldn't even lean against the walls. The only thing he could do was stand up ... and stand still.
They took him out eight hours later, when he was too hoarse to scream and the electric walls had no effect on his sagging body.
It was a different room, this time. A comfortable room with carpets on the floor and pictures on the wall and an over-stuffed sofa of some plastic material along one side.
The man waiting for him was the same young, saintly faced man who had picked him up on the street.
"This is Mr. Ainsworth," Tanner said in a low voice, and nudged him forward.
Mr. Ainsworth looked at him, shocked. "My God, son, haven't they taken care of your cuts?"
Stan just stared at him. Mr. Ainsworth's shocked look faded into one of grim efficiency.
"We'll have to do something about that, son—and right away!" He pressed a button and turned to Tanner. "Take this man to the infirmary immediately, Fred! And don't bring him back here until he's been bathed and issued new clothes!"
He looked back at Stan, his face a study in sympathy and pity. "Believe me, I had no idea...."
It was a reprieve from hell.
He was taken to an infirmary where doctors and nurses, their faces entirely hidden behind gauze masks, bathed him and washed his cuts and covered them with collodion and gave him a hypodermic shot of something that relaxed his muscles and banished his pain completely. They destroyed the rags he had on and in their place he was issued a suit of blue serge, like the one Tanner wore.
When he went back to the room with the carpets and the sofa, Mr. Ainsworth had set up a small dinner table. The room was thick with the fragrance of fried eggs and bacon and hot buttered toast and steaming coffee.
Stan's stomach knotted and turned and he suddenly was sick.
"Take it easy," Mr. Ainsworth said gently. "Go slow at first."
Stan pulled a chair over to the table. He felt weak. Eggs and bacon and coffee.... After he had finished, he sat back and took the cigarette that Mr. Ainsworth offered him.
"What am I doing here, Mr. Ainsworth? Why can't I get a lawyer?"
"I wish I could answer all your questions," the saintly faced man said thoughtfully. "But you have to understand that I'm just a hired hand here. There are some things I'm not at liberty to tell you."
"If I'm not in jail, then just where the hell am I?" Stan asked bitterly.
Mr. Ainsworth held up his hands. "I'm sorry, Stan."
Things weren't adding up, Stan thought, confused. Where was he if he wasn't in jail? The cell and the slightly curving corridor, all of metal. And the doctors and the nurses, their faces almost hidden behind their gauze masks....
"They took me to see a Mr. Malcolm the other day," Stan said in a low voice. "He told me I hated the city and that I even hated my own mother and brother. Can you beat that? Honest, this character...."
His voice trailed away. Mr. Ainsworth was staring at the floor, a frown on his face.
"Everybody builds up resentments against parents who are overly strict, Stan. And it's not unusual for a mother to favor one of her children over the others."
Stan stared at him, open-mouthed.
"But you're agreeing with Mr. Malcolm," he whispered. "Honest, you must be a little crazy, too."
Mr. Ainsworth looked hurt.
"I'm your friend, Stan—I wouldn't lie to you! I didn't save your life just so I could tell you lies!"
It was crazy, Stan thought. He had been on his way to the stockyards one morning and the roof had fallen in. He had been kidnapped and tortured apparently for no other reason than to be told he hated his family.
It didn't make sense.
He dropped his cigarette on the carpet and ground it out under his heel. "You're just as bad as the others—you're working right in with them!"
Mr. Ainsworth looked disappointed and pressed a button on his desk. Tanner appeared in the doorway, his face as impersonal as ever.
"You'll have to take him back, Fred." He looked at Stan sadly. "We're trying to be your friends, son, and you won't let us. We're only telling you the truth!"
Stan started to shake. "You can go to hell," he blurted.
Tanner took him by the arm to lead him out and the very touch of his hand made Stan tremble even more. He was shaking like a leaf, and he couldn't stop it. It had been such an odd thing. When he had told Mr. Ainsworth he was as bad as the others, Mr. Ainsworth had ... flickered.
CHAPTER III
They stripped him and put him in a room that felt like the inside of a packing-house refrigerator. His breath came in little wisps of fog and if he stood in one place too long, his feet started to freeze to the floor. He had to keep moving to keep warm and he realized he couldn't keep moving forever. It was cold and damp and at periodic intervals, it rained from pipes overhead. Water that quickly froze on the floor and made his hair a mass of frosted crystals and then started to freeze on him.
He only lasted four hours in the cold room. When they took him out, his nails were broken from clawing at the door frame and he had started to bleed at the fingertips.
Mr. Malcolm questioned him again.
Why wouldn't he admit that he hated his family? His mother was responsible for his father deserting the family. And his brother used to squeal on him when he was small and had even taken money that Stan used to leave on the dresser.
Stan made the mistake of laughing and ended up in a cell where he couldn't stand, where he had to remain stooped all the time. A small tray of slops appeared after each time he slept and once every sleeping period, somebody cleaned it out.
Mr. Ainsworth questioned him next and it meant a bath and food and cigarettes and rest. He took them and enjoyed them.
Then he told Mr. Ainsworth what he thought of him. They threw him in a small, pitch-black cell and left him there. For weeks. Months.
He spent his time huddled in a corner, thinking of the city and his mother and Larry and what Spring looked like and how leaves that ended up in the Fall as large as your hand, started out as nothing more than a strip of green no bigger than his fingernail. A dozen times a period, he went over the last scene his eyes had glimpsed from Mr. Ainsworth's car. The drab houses and the green trees and the tiny stretch of blue beyond....
And then there were the days when he didn't think of anything—though he was to wonder later if it had been days or weeks or even only hours. There was nothing by which to judge time, though he tried to keep track of his own pulse and counted the beats into minutes and the minutes into hours and the hours into days.
It was Mr. Ainsworth who rescued him.
"It's been a long time since I've seen you, son."
"You know where I've been."
"Don't hate me, Stan. I'm only trying to help you."
"I appreciate it," Stan said dryly.
And the odd thing was, he honestlydidappreciate it. Ainsworth represented sleep and a bath and food and clean clothes. And he was grateful. Like any dog that had been kicked and starved and then wagged its tail when it was patted on the head.
And knowing all of this didn't change his reactions in the least.
"Stan," Mr. Ainsworth said quietly, "they want you to say that you hate your family. You say you don't. Perhaps you believe that. But would it hurt to merelysaythat you do? You don't have to actually believe it." He paused. "And to be perfectly truthful, I'm afraid that you might not live very much longer if you're not willing to go that far."
Stan jerked, as if somebody had jabbed him with a pin. To come so near to dying so many times had made life seem infinitely precious.
And what did it matter, actually? Some of the things they had been telling him—they weren't exactly lies.
"All right," he said dully. "So I hate the city. And I hate my folks."
Somewhere in his mind, a keystone crumbled.
"That's the way, son. Play it smart!" Mr. Ainsworth looked very proud of himself, as if Stan had just passed a difficult test.
"It's not supposed to stop there, is it?" Stan asked. "What am I supposed to believe in next, so you people won't kill me?"
"I don't think you're looking at it in the right light," Mr. Ainsworth said coldly, and Stan was panic-stricken for fear he would call in Fred and have him taken back to the cold room or the small cell. "We're just telling you things about yourself that you didn't know before."
"Sure," Stan said quickly, trying to sound sincere. "You're just telling me things I never would have suspected."
He got better treatment after that. They assigned him to a cell where he could lie down and sleep and when they talked to him, they offered him cigarettes and joked with him. Even Mr. Malcolm went out of his way to be pleasant. They were uncannily accurate when they told him about his past life and he got to thinking more and more that there was something in what they said.
His mother had been no prize and his brother was a lying, little sneak.
Almost a year went by before they led him up to the big one.
When they told him, point blank, that he hated humanity.
Stan felt like somebody had knocked the wind out of him.
"You can't be serious!"
Mr. Ainsworth sighed and shook his head. "Stan, do you remember when I first picked you up? Three of your fellow human beings had dragged you into an alley and were beating you up—you would have been killed if I hadn't come along." He shrugged. "That's the human race for you, son!"
"But they were only three individuals!" Stan objected.
"And the others are so much different?" Mr. Ainsworth sneered. "Nobody cared about you, Stan—not even your own family. No human being cares for anybody else but himself! There's a war every generation where they slaughter each other by the millions. And sickness. Have they ever made any really concerted drive against it? Have they ever really tried to stamp out poverty?"
His lip curled. "They're apes! Nothing but apes!"
"You talk like you're not human!" Stan said, and then realized that he had made a mistake.
Mr. Ainsworth started to flicker again, like film in a projector that's run down. Stan gripped the sides of his chair and froze, trying desperately not to show his fear.
Mr. Ainsworth was watching him closely. "I think we should tell you what this is all about, Stan. Watch."
He pressed a button on his desk and the wall behind him started to glow, then drifted away like cigarette smoke. Stan closed his eyes, feeling dizzy and sick and horribly afraid that he was going to fall. He opened them again, slowly.
The end of the room opened out on a harsh, black sky dusted with the tiny pin points of stars. Stars that didn't twinkle but shone with a bright, steady blaze. To his left and below he could see a huge segment of a mottled green and blue globe, laced over with shifting shreds of white.
He was almost sick again and then the grandeur of the scene struck him and he caught his breath, sharply.
He was somewhere in space, suspended thousands of miles above his home planet and seeing the universe as man had never seen it before. The blazing infinity of stars and the slowly rolling, green globe that was the Earth....
"The home of the apes," Mr. Ainsworth mused. He paused. "We can use that planet to far better advantage than the human race. We intend to take it. And you're going to help us."
Stan looked at Mr. Ainsworth coldly.
"What's in it for me?"
CHAPTER IV
"Half the world," Mr. Ainsworth said slowly. "One half of your whole, wide world!"
Stan stared at him coldly for a full minute, then started to laugh—laughter that ripped out of him like waves and washed against the sides of the room.
Sick laughter, because he knew the price he was going to have to pay for it.
He sobered. There was a time, he thought, when every human being had to stand up and be counted as a brave man or a coward. This was his.
"And you thought I would take it! You thought I would sell out the whole human race!" His face was seamed with hate and he thumped his chest proudly, suddenly not caring what happened to himself. His voice was hoarse. "I'm one of the apes, remember? They'remypeople and it'smyplanet...."
Mr. Ainsworth's face looked like it was carved from a block of ice.
"Look at me, Martin!Look at me!"
Stan looked and felt the sweat pop out on his forehead and his stomach knot into a small, hard ball.
Mr. Ainsworth was fading, the frames slipping past so slow Stan could count them. And the image that was building up in Mr. Ainsworth's place....
Stan screamed and staggered back against the bulkhead, his arm raised before his eyes.
"You're going to help us," the creature said in a horribly liquid voice. "You're going to help us because you want to. We need advance men to soften this planet up. You're going to be one of them. And after you've done your work, our fleet will arrive!"
It paused dryly.
"But I see you've still got some indoctrination to go through!"
They took him back to one of the cells and starved him and let him live in his own filth until he wasn't sure if he was a human being or some sort of animal. They made him horribly afraid of pain until he screamed in agony when they merely laid the knives on the table. And with pain as a wedge, they took his personality apart piece by piece and flayed it and tortured it until it no longer resembled the personality that had once been Stanley Martin.
He was cut off from all contact with human beings—or creatures who had masqueraded as human. Tanner had disappeared and Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm no longer bothered to appear as homo sapiens. They saw him every waking day and if their interviews had been harsh before, now they were brutal beyond belief.
He believed what they said and he thought what they wanted him to think.
Not to have done so would have meant death.
But there was still ... resistance. The personality that had been Stanley Martin wasn't entirely gone. There were still shattered fragments of memories and wishes and desires that hadn't been entirely obliterated. Tiny fragments that made him unreliable.
On the last day, he was strapped into a machine with clamps that fastened tightly to his head and chest.
The lights dimmed and he was alone in the darkness.
"What is your name?"
The tiny fragments of personality struggled and thought and then collapsed in bewilderment.
"I ... I'm not sure."
The voices from nowhere continued.
"You have a family. You hate that family."
A faint, drifting haze of memories. Of a woman who had cooked his meals and tucked him into bed at night when he was very young. Of somebody named Larry who had once bailed him out of a street fight by making like Bob Feller with some good-sized rocks....
But what was bed?
What was street-fights?
What was Bob Feller?
"I ... guess so."
The room exploded in blinding light that seared his eyes and lanced his brain.
"Are you sure?"
"Oh yes! Oh God, yes!"
The agony was over and once again the room was mercifully black.
"You hate the cities."
The cities.
The decaying houses and the rotting tenements. The stinking alleys and the littered parks and the filthy buildings.
And the lawns and the happy kids and the beaches....
He didn't answer.
Somewhere within his mind a wheel started to spin. Slow. Then faster and faster until he was sweating and shaking with nausea and then it felt like he was flying apart into small fragments that tore and buffeted each other and pained....
Of course he hated the cities.
For a moment, peace.
"The apes. You hate the apes. You hate the human race."
The human race.Hisrace. The pieces that were Stanley Martin started to flow together, to coalesce once more into a single individual....
And then his nerve endings and ganglions felt sharp, searing pain. Pain that threaded along his nerves and burned into every segment of his body, pain that threatened to fry his cortical centers.
Pain that scattered the particles of personality that were Stanley Martin and shriveled them to nothingness. Pain that obliterated the last traces of conscience and memory.
"You hate the human race," a voice repeated smoothly.
"Yes," Stan said, not hesitating. "I hate the human race." And then he started to sweat and shake with an unreasoning anger that flooded him as suddenly as if somebody had turned on a hose. The pain.... The pain for which the apes were responsible.
"I hate the apes! I hate their goddamned guts!"
A silent wave of exultation swept the compartment. They had fashioned the mold and had made their monster....
Five minutes later, the space ship departed for its home system.
"I hate the human race." And....
CHAPTER V
He was 24 years old. A tall, unsmiling, handsome man dressed in a blue serge suit and a hat that he liked to pull down over his eyes so he could look at the world as if it were in a frame. He wasn't the type who made friends and there was a subtle air of menace about him that frightened the people with whom he came in contact. He was a stranger who looked at the world with cold and calculating eyes, like a scientist might look at a piece of lab apparatus. Women were intrigued by him, made their approaches, and hastily left—a little insulted and far more frightened.
Apes.
He was no longer 17, he was no longer a boy, and he wouldn't have shed a tear if he had been stretched on the rack. A hardness and a sense of power showed in the lines of his face and the set of his shoulders. People who talked to him felt inferior, as if they had been talking to a superman. And to a large degree they were absolutely right.
A small Thuscan flyer set him down one night on a fog-bound, Scotch moor, not far from Paisley. The next afternoon he had rented an apartment in Bristol and installed the first load of equipment. For the next three months, he did nothing but observe and travel—and buy up some small parcels of property in fifty different cities spread far and wide over the globe.
He started to set up an organization, though he had difficulty finding men to staff it. Most of those who would have qualified had been executed or were behind bars for life. But by the end of six months, his organization was almost complete. Reynolds, Langerman, and Caldwell were his lieutenants—the men who got their hands dirty and directed those in the next echelon down.
His right hand man was sent to him by Thusca. A powerful, urbane-looking man who smiled often with his mouth but never with his eyes. A guard let him in and he stood quietly in the rear of the room while Stan continued with his briefing session.
There were a dozen new men at the meeting, listening intently to what he had to say.
They were the type whose loyalty was to money, Stan thought, amused. Hard-faced men who had probably fought for a dozen different causes and switched sides as easily as changing a shirt.
Stan had almost finished with the briefing.
"Essentially, it's a simple smuggling operation. Only you're not to know what you're smuggling and under no condition are you to open your packages."
A man up front suddenly interrupted. "Why not?"
Stan smiled bleakly. "The packages are triggered, Piazza, I'm very much afraid if you tried to open it your head would be blown off. Satisfied?"
He turned back to the others. "We pay very well—very well, indeed. A smart man, who isn't too curious, will find it well worth his while. We'll give you the packages and tell you where to leave them. In some cases, it will involve extensive travel on your part. Be cautious, be careful, and be quick on the trigger in case anybody tries to take them away from you."
The man whom Stan had called Piazza stood up and started for the door. Stan watched him quietly until his hand was on the knob.
"What's the matter, Piazza?"
The man turned and spat on the carpet. "I don't like your proposition. I think it stinks. We take all the risks and we don't even know what we're doing!"
Stan shook his head sadly. "I'm sorry, Piazza. Really sorry. I had hoped we could use you."
Piazza whitened. "I'm no stoolie, Mr. Martin."
"We can't take the risk," Stan said simply.
In a movement that only one pair of eyes could follow, he reached inside his coat and shot through the cloth of the lapel.
Piazza looked faintly surprised and slumped limply to the floor.
Stan smiled coldly at the others.
"I assume the rest of you can be counted on?"
After the others had left, the man in back walked up and introduced himself, flashing the small, fluorescent identity card that labeled him as having come from Thusca.
"Tanner." Stan frowned. "Funny, I think I've heard the name before but I can't place it."
"I met you briefly on Thusca," Tanner said easily.
Stan shook his head. "No, it's before then." He paused. "But that's impossible!"
Tanner raised his eyebrows. "Why?"
Stan looked surprised. "Didn't they tell you? Just before I started on this mission, I lost my memory. Crack on the head or something. I only saw two people before I left and they were busy filling me on what I was supposed to do here. Didn't have time to see the doctors." He walked to the liquor cabinet and started mixing himself a drink. "I'll be seeing Mr. Ainsworth and Mr. Malcolm in a few months and maybe they can help me then."
"You don't think your memory is liable to come back ... here, do you?" Tanner asked curiously.
Stan laughed. "Not a chance—there's nothing that's apt to be familiar onthisplanet!" He dropped in the ice cubes. "Still, it's awkward. For all I remember of my past life, I might as well have been born in a vat."
Tanner smiled faintly. "I didn't know you were in the smuggling business."
"It's a good front and one in which we won't get our own fingers dirty. Besides, you haven't asked me what we were smuggling."
Tanner swirled his drink so the ice cubes clinked against the side.
"Alright, what are we smuggling?"
"Sometimes packages, sometimes suitcases, sometimes hat-boxes. Our men take receipt of the packages and deliver them to different destinations where they think they're going to be picked up. Perhaps a broom closet in a building, perhaps a trash box on a city street, maybe a locker in a train station. There's only two things I haven't told the men—what's in the boxes, and the fact that they're never going to be picked up."
"What happens then?"
Stan sat down in a leather upholstered chair and threw a leg over the arm. "Nothing. Not until November 4th, that is. At twelve noon, London time, half the cities of this world will be blown off the globe."
Tanner looked puzzled. "So? The air forces the fleets, and the armies will still be intact."
"They'll be much too busy to fight us," Stan said smoothly. "You see, Tanner, they'll be fighting each other."
Which actually was very clever, Stan thought slowly. The divide and conquer theory. Each of the packages contained a Thuscan fusion weapon. Once they were set off, each country would think that another had sprung a sneak attack.
November 4th, Tanner and he would strike. November 5th, the world would be in chaos.
November 6th, the Thuscan fleet would land.
Tanner walked to the middle of the room and stood over the body of Piazza. "What are you going to do with our friend?"
"Send him away—I think to Africa." Stan picked the body up and lugged it into what had once been the bedroom. Now it was a room jammed with transmitting equipment and, against the far wall, a single hoop of shining metal standing upright on a black marble base. The hoop was large, over six feet in diameter, with a thin, metal filament winding around it.
He turned a dial set in the base. The filament glowed red and then a brilliant white. The hoop itself shimmered and faded, while at the same time a whirling circle of brilliant black built up where it had been. He tensed his muscles and heaved and Piazza's body hit the circle and disappeared, like a man plunging into quicksand.
"Where will he land?"
"In a doorway on the Street of Lepers in Casablanca." Stan turned the dial again and the whirling circle slowed and became translucent and then faded out altogether as the hoop sprang back into view.
Tanner gestured to the other equipment. "What's all this for?"
"Transmitting equipment to set off the fusion packages." Stan pointed to two box-like structures against the far wall. One held a bank of fifty small, white lights. The other, a bank of fifty red. "The white lights are the operators themselves—I can tell immediately if anything happens to them. The others represent the fusion packages. If one of them goes, I know the package has been tampered with."
Even as he watched, one of the white lights flickered and died.
Tanner looked surprised. "What happened?"
"We just lost an agent," Stan said grimly. "Chicago sector." He glanced over at the bank of red lights—they were still lit. "It couldn't have been about the fusion packages. It must have been about the ... other operation." He looked at Tanner. "The one you were sent to handle."
"What are you going to do about it?"
Stan shrugged. "We'll handle it ourselves, and then recruit another agent." He leafed through a filing cabinet, then finally pulled a dossier and gave it to Tanner. "Trace this man and find out what you can. We'll meet there in a week."
Tanner tapped the card lightly against his knuckles. "Mr. Ainsworth didn't think you'd be meeting any opposition."
Stan blanked his face of expression. He wasn't exactly sure why, but he didn't like Tanner.
"I didn't expect to."
There was a short silence and then Tanner walked to the hoop and worked the dial. The shimmering black sprang up and he stepped up on the marble. Just before he went through, he said: "What are you going to do about the ... opposition?"
"When we find them, we'll smash them," Stan said coldly.
After Tanner had gone through, Stan shut off the hoop. As the circle faded it caught his image and held it briefly, like a mirror.
He stared at it abstractly.
The problem of possible opposition bothered him but there was something that worried him even more. Something he caught himself thinking about when he woke up in the morning. Something he thought about all day and something he couldn't get out of his mind when he went to bed at night.
Who was he?
CHAPTER VI
It was a summer evening and downtown Chicago was a hot-box of sweltering buildings and steaming tar streets. People stretched out on the lawns in front of Buckingham fountain for any stray breezes that might wander in off the lake or else they curled up in front of fans and read until the small hours of the morning when the temperature had drifted down a few degrees so it was possible to go to bed without drowning in a pool of their own sweat.
A woman walking by the Pure Oil building suddenly saw a shimmering in the air and then a man was standing in the shadowed doorway, staring nonchalantly at her. She almost screamed, then put it down to the heat and hurried by.
Stan strolled up Michigan Boulevard to stop for a moment in front of a bookstore where a man had been staring in the window.
"All set, Fred?"
Tanner nodded. "He leaves the Prudential building in half an hour. He parks his car on the ramp below the street, in the parking lot that runs parallel to the river. It's in the far corner—a sport model." He fumbled in his pocket for a small card. "Here's the license number. The ape is easy enough to recognize. About sixty years old, sport coat, and a pork-pie hat. He's had a small office here for a couple of weeks, doing government work, so he might be carrying a briefcase. Tomorrow he goes back east."
Stan memorized the description. "Just how good is he?"
"The best they've got. Losing him will be quite a blow to the apes. Quite a blow."
Stan stood in the shadows of the bookstore for a few minutes more. He could hear every tiny noise on the street, including the rapid tick-tick-tick of his own wrist-watch.
"I better go down. Be ready to help with the body five minutes after the hour."
He turned and started up the street, to the stairs that would take him to the level below. Hundreds of cars were parked in neat, silent rows below the ramp. Overhead was the cold brilliance of hundreds of fluorescent lamps.
Light enough he thought. It wouldn't be ... sporting ... to shoot the ape scientist down in the dark.
He found the bright, two-toned sports car at the end of the ramp. Nobody was in sight. He smiled to himself and walked on past the car and then stood quietly in the shadows of a concrete pillar. He had a while to wait and disquieting thoughts swam slowly to the surface of his mind.
This city of Chicago. He had been to many cities on the planet but this was the only one that somehow ... bothered him. A city that seemed oddly, tantalizingly familiar. And there was a pressing urgency for him to see some people in it....
But as an agent of Thusca, he could afford no time for such neurotic thoughts. He would tell the doctors about it when he returned, but right now there was work.
He stood there without moving a muscle, thinking of nothing at all, as if Stanley Martin were only an illusion and didn't really exist. It was a quarter to six.
Ten minutes to six.
Six o'clock.
And footsteps thudding on the concrete stairs a block away.
The man in the pork-pie hat was coming to get his car.
Stan set the stud on his heat gun and waited.
An ape.
The man came closer and fumbled at the door of his automobile, trying to get the key into the lock.
Stan pressed the stud and the violet beam flashed out and splashed on the car door six inches from the man's hand. The paint flared into a smoking fire and a neat, thin line raced down the metal, cutting cleanly through the body and the upholstery and the steel frame.
He'd let him squirm for a second, Stan thought coldly, and then move the beam back and cut the ape in two.
Now!
He never touched the man. There was a spanging sound and the pillar Stan was leaning against suddenly showed concrete chips. He fell backwards and sprawled on the pavement, the violet beam from his heat gun crazily scorching the concrete overhead.
Somebody yelled to the man crouched by the car....
"Run! Run, you fool!"
The man in the pork-pie hat dodged up the ramp. Stan tried to pick him off but the pillar showered concrete again and his aim was spoiled. Then the man was gone and Stan's mind turned to his own problems.
The opposition had finally put in an appearance....
"Come out now and you can come out alive. Fight, and we'll bring you out dead!"
A woman's voice, he thought coldly. Coming from a car about a hundred feet down....
He aimed his heater and exploded the gas tank, the flames whooshing out into the closed space.
"You didn't think we were actually there, did you?"
He fired again and then a steady shower of concrete chips that sprayed his elbow made him glance at the pillar, alarmed. It had been cut entirely away at the top and now it was being chewed away at the bottom, ready to topple over on him.
He set his heater for a fan-shaped ray to cover his movements and scrambled out from behind the pillar, desperately trying to dodge over to the line of cars.
Something spanged into his shoulder and spun him around. He fell heavily to the pavement, the pain briefly paralyzing his nerves. He waited a split second for the pain to lessen, then tried to scramble for his heater. The cement in front of him exploded into dust and chips that cut his face and almost blinded his eyes.
"Get up!"
She stepped out from behind another pillar. A tall, black-haired woman with wide cheek-bones and cold, green eyes. Her face was hard and she carried her hand weapon with all the assurance of one who was thoroughly familiar with it. Two men came with her. They were capable looking men but not the grim, hard-eyed professionals that Stan was used to working with.
The woman walked over to Stan and slapped his face—hard—her nails digging bloody furrows in his skin.
"How does it feel to be a traitor? How does it feel to sell out your native planet for nothing at all?"
He didn't know what she was talking about and his face showed it.
"It was a clever scheme," she continued bitterly. "To win a planet, you first cut off its head—you eliminate the scientists!" She leveled her hand weapon at him. "But that's not all you've had in mind. What other schemes has the renegade earthman thought of?"
The world slipped into a haze of red and his hand darted for the pocket where he kept his heat gun—to pause, uncertainly, when he remembered it lay on the concrete fifteen feet away.
"I'm no ape!"
She laughed. "They've made you into a Pavlovian dog that drools whenever they ring a bell—and you don't even realize what they've done to you! They pull the strings and their marionette jerks and dances and does their dirty work for them!"
Stan stared at her coldly. "What are you going to do?"
"Kill you. Now."
She raised the weapon and Stan knew she was perfectly capable of doing it. A moment more and the small pellets would burrow into his body, to explode deep in the flesh. He tensed himself for a final effort to escape, knowing it would be next to useless.
"You poor fool," she said slowly. "You'll be better off dead."
Her finger tightened on the trigger.
She never pulled it. There was a scream behind her and one of her men collapsed to the pavement, a thin swirl of smoke drifting up from his blasted chest. The girl's eyes narrowed, then she suddenly darted towards the river that lapped against the parking level. The remaining man dropped to his knees to cover her escape and the ramp was filled with the spanging sound of his own pistol.
The sound ceased abruptly in another burst of flames and smoke and then Tanner was racing down the ramp.
"Don't let her get away!"
Stan ran to the river's edge and Tanner cut the oily surface with lancing rays from his heater.
"She's gone," Stan said in a tired voice. "Save it." He watched the surface for a moment more, than turned back to Tanner. "Who was she? What's her name?"
Tanner shrugged. "I don't know who she is or what she's doing here. I can't tell you."
He wouldn't forget her, Stan thought slowly. That long, black hair and those green eyes. And she had moved like a cat, a sleek cat who was just as willing to kill for a cause as he was.
Tanner was studying his face. "Don't get any ideas about her—she's an ape."
Stan looked at him coldly. "The only idea I have is to kill her before she kills me."
He started walking towards another flight of stairs a block down. How long had it been since he had walked down the ramp? he wondered. There had been the noise and the oily smoke from the automobile. The ramp should have been swarming with curious apes by now. But for some reason it wasn't....
It had shaken him, he thought slowly. His briefing on Thusca had mentioned nothing about an opposition organization of the apes. And in particular, it had mentioned nothing about a ... girl.
He would have to warn the agents in his own organization, he thought abstractly. And it would probably be best to use a code name. He asked Tanner for a suggestion.
"Use a girl's name," Tanner mused. "Say ... Avis."
Stan looked at him sharply and had the odd feeling that was really the girl's name. And then he recalled Tanner racing down the ramp screaming "Don't let her get away!" and the disappointed look on his face when she had.
Tanner, Stan decided suddenly, had lied about not knowing her.
"She'll probably be around again," Tanner mused out loud. "And soon."
The second agent disappeared in Paris, two weeks later.
CHAPTER VII
It was eight o'clock Thursday evening when Stan stepped out of a faintly glowing circle of black light in a small alley off the Rue Pigalle in Paris. He calmly lit a cigarette and walked down the street to a small cafe.
It was bigger on the inside than it looked from the street. A long, low-ceilinged room with a tiny platform and a small band, almost hidden by the cigarette smoke, at the far end. Tanner and Reynolds, one of Stan's lieutenants, were seated at a small table along the side, earnestly talking to a frightened little man with an old-fashioned walrus moustache.
Stan squeezed in next to the little man and introduced himself. He ordered wine, then said: "You know the arrangements?"
The little man looked stubborn. "I'm not sure I like it."
"We're not asking much—and we'll pay well."
The little man made a show of licking his lips and nervously twisting his moustache.
"I don't get you, guv'nor. You want to give me a hundred thousand francs just to deliver a package to the souvenir stand at the top of the Eiffel Tower?"
"You're to give the girl a hundred francs," Stan cut in smoothly. "And ask her if she'll hold it for a Monsieur Lorenz."
The little man's eyelids drooped suggestively. "You're up to no good and a hundred thousand francs doesn't seem to me to cover it."
Stan moved in closer, threateningly. The little man thrust out his chin and glared at him.
"Just you watch your step, guv'nor! All I 'ave to do is 'oller 'elp and fifty people will be on your neck. And what's to keep me from talking about this anyways?"
"I could kill you right while you sit there," Stan said quietly. "I could do it and you wouldn't make a sound and nobody would know you were dead until ten minutes after we left."
The little man's eyes showed white and he nervously twisted a heavy ring on his finger. "You wouldn't dare, guv'nor. A bloke like you wouldn't dare!"
"You'll do exactly as we say," Stan interrupted coldly. "And if we wanted you to, you'd do it for exactly nothing." He smiled grimly. "Your real name is William Clark. You're in this country without a visa or a passport. You jumped ship from a British freighter during the war. Your wife died shortly after you signed up for your last voyage and there was some talk about it. But you disappeared and they never found you again or heard from you and the case was dropped."
He paused. "Do you want me to go on?"
The little man's eyes were wide and beads of sweat were dripping off the ends of his moustache.
"Why now, you wouldn't turn in an old man, would you, guv'nor? I've been clean ever since I been over 'ere! I 'aven't done a thing!"
Stan stared at him coldly. "Will you or won't you? You know the woman who runs the stand. It shouldn't be difficult."
The little man pretended to think about it for a moment.
"Why now, it doesn't seem like much," he mumbled. "Just a suitcase and you say all you want me to do is leave it with the woman?"
He had him, Stan thought.
"Be careful how you handle the suitcase and under no circumstances drop it—you'd be damned sorry if you did."
The little man drained his glass of wine. "When do I get my quid?"
"When we deliver the suitcase. Tomorrow."
The little man shivered and stood up.
"All right, I'll do it." He sidled past Tanner and stopped at the edge of the table. "Your eyes, guv'nor," he said suddenly, looking at Stan. "I swear to the Almighty, they're 'angman's eyes!"
Hangman's eyes.
Somewhere, someplace, Stan mused, he had thought that about somebody else. About Fred Tanner.
But he couldn't remember where it had been, or when.
Tanner fumbled in his wallet and gave the heavy man sitting next to him, a bill. "Reynolds, order up some more wine and see if they have any sandwiches, will you?" After Reynolds had left, he turned to Stan. "How many will this make?"
Stan ticked them off on his fingers.
"One in Chicago's Palmolive building, one in the Woolworth building on Manhattan Island, one in a dressing room of the Old Howard in Boston. Glasgow, Tokyo, Moscow, London, Rome and 41 others. And now Paris. They're all covered. Fifty ape cities—none of them long for this world."
Tanner nodded thoughtfully. "Mr. Ainsworth will be very pleased. Very pleased indeed."
Reynolds was back with a wine bottle in a small wicker basket and a plate of tired looking sandwiches. Stan drank the wine and ate the sandwiches without actually tasting them at all.
The cities were dirty, filthy ghettoes of brick and stone and the people were only apes, he mused. But somehow....
William Clark lived in a small, stuccoed rooming house in a suburb midway between Paris and Versailles. It looked old even for a rooming house in France, Stan thought. There was a mustiness and an age you could sense even from the outside. The ivy that climbed the walls was dead, the stucco was chipped in spots, and the curtains he could see through the windows looked yellowed and limp.
He climbed the front steps and worked the heavy knocker, then stood back waiting for the concierge to show up.
She didn't.
He tried the knocker again and then the door knob. There was a sudden snapping sound, the door creaked open, and he stepped in.
Dust—billows of it—rose from the hall rug. Dust that almost choked him before it settled once more on an ancient window seat and clung to the moldering drapes.
He turned to Tanner and felt a shock of surprise. Tanner was cradling his heat gun in his hands, ready for instant action. His face was grim.
"What kind of a man would you say Clark was, Martin?"
"Offhand, kind of a tidy little man and...."
"Not the type who would be living in an ancient rooming house?"
"That's right—he wasn't the type."
"Where did Clark say he lived?"
"Second floor—end of the hall."
"Let's go!"
Stan hesitated a moment. He was supposed to be in charge of the operation, yet Tanner was taking over. For a very good reason—Tanner knew something that he didn't. He followed Tanner up the stairs, his feet sending out little puffs of dust from the stair treads. Clark's room was closed and he knocked lightly on the door.
There was no answer.
He tried the knob.
Locked.
"Reynolds—break it down."
The big man hunched his shoulders and drove for the door. The panel burst like it had been made from paper and he stumbled to the center of the room before he could stop himself.
"That was a foolish thing to have him do, Martin."
"Why?"
"You didn't know what to expect—it could have been a trap."
Stan's voice chilled. "You've been acting like a cat on a hot griddle ever since we walked in. Just what were you expecting?"
Tanner didn't answer. He sauntered into the room. "Well, where's Clark?"
That was a good question, Stan thought. Just where was Clark? He glanced around the room. The average rooming house cell, the kind so many people on this planet seemed to live in. A bureau and an unmade bed, the blankets rumpled and twisted....
There was a linen runner on top of the bureau and on top of that was a glass, neatly wrapped in cellophane. He walked over and barely touched it, intent on moving the glass to get a better look at a photograph behind it.
The cellophane cracked and crumbled at his touch.
The photograph behind it wasn't important, Stan thought. A photo of a ship on which Clark had been a crew member.
What was important was the cellophane that had crumbled at his touch and the dusty linen runner which hung in tattered shreds where it overlapped the top of the bureau.
As if the weight of the cloth had become too much for the strength of the linen thread.
Old.
Incredibly old.
Tanner was standing by the window, looking out. When he moved back, his arm touched the curtain. The curtain collapsed and powdered, sifting down to the dusty carpet.
Stan watched it with intense curiosity, then moved over to the bed. The bed clothes were rumpled but they weren't lying flat. They were bunched in spots—as if somebody might still be underneath them.
He held his heat gun in one hand and flicked the blankets aside with the other. Like the curtains, they ripped and powdered.
Beneath the blankets was a skeleton—a few tattered pieces of cloth lying inside the gaunt bones. "I see you've found Clark," Tanner said.
"Clark?"
Stan could feel the sweat pop out on his forehead. Nobody on Thusca had ever told him that a man could die and the flesh on his bones shrivel to dust all in one evening. He bent over the bed. The skeleton was that of a man, a very old man, whose bones had started to calcify at the joints. There was nothing about it to link it with William Clark.
The little man with the walrus moustache had been middle-aged. He hadn't been old, he certainly hadn't been senile to the point where his joints were hardening.
Then he saw the ring on one of the finger bones. He touched it gingerly and rubbed away the green verdigris. The same ring he had seen Clark toy with at the tavern.
But the age! The incredible age!
He turned to Tanner, questioning. The narrow-eyed, dapperly dressed man was standing at one side of the window, his heat gun cocked. He was staring steadily through the glass and didn't bother to turn around. His voice was hard.
"You want to know what it's all about, don't you, Martin? Well, come on over and take a look for yourself."
"What about me?" a frightened voice suddenly rattled. "When's somebody going to tell me what's going on?"
Reynolds. They had forgotten all about him, Stan thought. Now the big man was shaking with fear, fear of the unknown. Stan wrinkled his nose. The ape was sweating and you could smell him clear across the room.
Tanner laughed easily. "I'll giveyoua full explanation later on, Reynolds. But right now we're in trouble!"
CHAPTER VIII
Stan ran to the other window and stared at the street below. It didn't seem any different than when he had come in a few minutes earlier. The wide boulevard of stucco houses, the shade trees and the lawns. And a few of the apes on the sidewalk, hurrying to work....
Only they weren't hurrying, he noticed after a moment. One man was halfway down the house steps across the street, a brief case under his arm. But he wasn't moving. He was frozen in mid-air, off-balance, one foot halfway down to the next step. A housewife had stopped in mid-stride two doors down, her shopping bag swung forward at an awkward angle. At the corner, a small Renault car was poised in the middle of the street, caught in the process of turning.
Further down the block, two small boys in short pants and berets had been playing catch. One was crouched, his hand out. The other was standing, one foot in the air and one upraised arm behind his head. Stan narrowed his eyes and located the ball. It was about ten feet from the thrower, crawling slowly through the air.