They stood facing each other across the few feet of store. Web reached again for the gun he did not have. Quickly—but with a gliding smoothness, in no hurry at all—the alien turned away. He sat down on a stool at the fountain.
Web stood for several seconds in the booth, watching.
He tried to think, but there was no time. Others would be gathering outside. He fought the impulse to run. After a long moment he opened the door of the booth and walked out into the store. The alien did not turn. The huge glass window of the store was unblocked. Web could see dozens of shoppers pass by in the night. In the crowd there would be old men. To go out now was foolish.
He walked over to the fountain and sat down two seats away from the alien. There was a fat, soda-eating woman between them. He ordered coffee.
No way out. They were not likely to come in, but there was no way out. Through the back door would be useless. Darker, less people. He looked down toward the alien. The little man was sitting quietly, the glass untouched before him. The nose was sharp in profile.
Web made up his mind quickly, in the only way possible. His strength, his size was his only asset. He would have to use it.
He paid for his coffee, picked up his change, then stood up and looked for the light switch. There were four long fluorescent tubes above him, no chance to break them all. He saw the light switch against the back wall, then took a deep breath.
He walked up quickly behind the alien.
The little man did not move.
"You," Web said.
The alien face swung toward him.
"Get up," Web said.
The dry face whitened, but the expression did not change and the old man did not say anything.
"I asked you to get up," Web said gently. His right hand hung low, Web clamped down on the alien's frail shoulder and jerked him to his feet. When the alien opened his mouth, Web hit him low. The man doubled. Web picked him up and heaved him the full length of the store, in the direction of the light switch. He leaped after the hurtling body, threw the switch.
In the sudden blessed blackness he found the alien's head on the floor, crashed it down twice with a great, nerveless strength. Frantically, savagely, while the fat lady screamed and the few other people bellowed toward the door, he searched the alien's pockets. There was nothing resembling a gun. What he found he jammed quickly into his own pocket, then whirled and waited, crouching.
Outside were shouts, and a crowd was forming. When there were enough people outside he stood up and ran for the door.
He weighed two hundred and forty pounds. He came through the door like a freight express, ripped into the crowd with all the power of his enormous body. He went through and over, came out the other side, let out his speed and began to run.
A light orange flame touched a brick wall near him, glowed briefly on a car, on a post, on a sign above him. He swerved. There was an alley, dark and open.
He ran into it, over the fence at the other end, and through a back yard. The flame followed in soft bursting balls. He was in another alley with open light in front of him, when the flame caught up with him.
It took him just under the right shoulder blade, burned a hole clean through him in the space of a second. He died on his feet, still running.
The recording was made in the drugstore, from an alley a few feet away. It was made just in time for the Galactics to turn their talents to other things. Altogether they had observed seven Faktors in the crowd that gathered in front of the store. Kunklin had already obliterated the four who lay in wait in the darkness at the rear, and the three at the hotel.
It was not difficult. There is no single being in the entire galaxy with the massed, polarized power of a Galactic repairman.
They found Web's body in the alley. It was of no use anymore, to anybody, and was inconvenient. So they dissolved it.
When Web awoke there was a light gentle clicking in his mind that he did not follow at all. He lay listening to it for a long while, gathering himself, creeping out of a thick numbness.
And then he sat bolt upright.
He was on a train.
The clicking was the sound of wheels against rails. He stared at the room around him, at the open window and the flat green fields rolling by beyond it. For a moment he was extremely dizzy. He lowered his head and waited.
After a while his head cleared and he could stand up. He walked unsteadily to the window and looked out, saw nothing but fields and quick-swishing poles. He turned back to the bunk on which he had been lying. He was alone in the compartment.
A train?
How in God's name did he get on a train?
The last thing he remembered was a numbing crouch, a heart-bursting need for action. Slowly at first, then with great clarity, he remembered being on the floor of the drugstore, waiting for the crowd to gather so he could make a dash for the door.
But he could not remember moving. He could not remember anything but crouching. And then—nothing. His memory ended like a burned-out match.
And there were no bruises or lumps on his head. He felt it carefully to make sure. The only pain he felt anywhere in his body was a dull, left-over aching in his side—that had come from the landing in the pod.
Well somehow, obviously, he had been knocked out.
But—the train.
Dammit, hadn't they been trying to kill him?
It made no sense. Never in his life had his mind just up and gone blank. But he had not been hit. He had been paralyzed somehow, and taken out of the drugstore and—
He put his hand in his pocket. For the first time it occurred to him that he was wearing different clothes.
He sat down abruptly, looked down at himself with increasing amazement. The army clothes were gone. In their place was a stiff white shirt and brown tweed pants, and a loosely knotted red plaid tie. His eyes leaped to the door of the compartment. A matching tweed coat, obviously new, hung from a wire coat hanger.
Am I me? he asked himself. He was utterly lost.
Across from the bunk there was a small wash room and a mirror. He went over and looked at himself. He had not seen himself in a white shirt for a long time and for a moment it was odd, but then, it was his own face. There was no change. And he needed a shave.
He went back and sat down on the bed.
The minutes ticked by and when he had sat long enough without thinking of anything at all he caught a firm grip on himself and tried to go back over the whole thing. It was none of it real, and he immediately rejected it. He had not gone up in a satellite at all, or driven a halftrack out of a desert, and there was no naked man—
Yes he had. He damn well had.
He was Lieutenant Augustus Webster Hilton, and all of this had happened. He focused again on where he was.
A train. Alone.
Bound for where?
He moved suddenly, with a baffled, growing anger. One thing at least he could find out. He stood up and put on the jacket. He was on his way out to find a porter when he felt the bulge in his pocket.
Instantly, he remembered the things he had taken from the dead alien. They had been transferred to the pocket of his new clothes. The courtesy of it struck him as incredible. He spread the things out on the bed.
There was a set of keys, ordinary keys. There was a metallic disc about the size of a quarter, engraved with meaningless figures. A coin? A lucky piece? Probably a coin. There was a handkerchief, soiled, and a small box of pasty white tablets. He put them down immediately. The important thing was a card. A calling card, on the face of which, simply printed, were the words:
Albert Bosco, M.D.213 Wingate Rd.Chicago, Ill.
The card was white paper, nothing unusual, but he stared at it with mixed amazement and disbelief. It occurred to him for a rather horrible second that the man he had killed might conceivably not have been an alien.
But no. He recalled the nose clearly. The nose was alien, the man was alien. And where he had gotten the card, and what use he had for it, had probably died with him.
And then, of course, there was no reason why an alien named Albert Bosco could not be a doctor.
But that was all he had gotten from the alien's pockets. It was a curiously ordinary and unexciting mess of nothing, there was no trace here of anything not human. But it did give him one thing: his destination.
And whoever had put him on the train knew that too.
The first porter he found let slip, luckily, that his name had been given as Mr. Pringle. Where they got that one, or how they got him on the train, Web was never to know. And yessir, why sutinly, sir, said the porter, looking at him oddly, as he had every right to look, this here now train sho' does stop at Chicago.
When he left the train at Chicago it was after midnight.
Dammit, he said to himself bitterly, I got to do everything at night.
He had planned to dodge around the station a bit before leaving, but there was no crowd. The place was wide and bare, stony, with a few night travelers dozing on benches. None of them he could see had sharp noses.
But now he was not sure whether they were after him or not, because—
—who in God's name had put him on the train?
He brooded for a while in a small coffee shop, but it got more and more complicated. Since the aliens had not killed him, and in fact obviously meant for him to go to Chicago and look up this man Bosco, there was no way to understand the bombing of the pod, or the empty trucks, or anything. Were there two kinds of aliens, the good guys and the bad guys? That was possible. His mind opened up. If you accept the presence of one alien, you might just as well accept dozens.
And that was quite a thought. As a matter of fact, how many aliens were there, really? The whole darn world could be shot through with aliens, skinny ones, fat ones, straight ones, bent ones, maybe all the odd-looking people he knew were aliens. Maybe even, maybe Dundon was an alien.
He looked around furtively. In a coffee shop, late at night and not a very clean coffee shop, it is remarkable how thoroughly inhuman people can look.
He left the shop.
Well, he had no way of knowing what was up, who was good or who was bad. But a lot of men had died, and until he knew why, and who did it, and how, and could protect himself, he was going to trust nobody. He was not going to walk deserted streets in the middle of the night looking for Bosco. He hailed a cab for the Statler Hotel. To his relief, he found that there was a Statler in Chicago.
He was given a room for which he could not possibly pay if he stayed here for any length of time, and he thought once more of Dundon.
He would have to call Dundon. He would explain the last few hours as some kind of amnesia, during which he had gotten out of the drugstore safely, bought some new clothes, read the alien's card, and boarded a train for Chicago, all without knowing it.
Although that was the most logical explanation, there was an odd feeling in his mind and he did not believe it. But he decided to tell Dundon that anyway.
It was while he was making the call that the Faktors found him again.
VI
Toward morning reality began to close in upon Ivy with a cold, numbing flow. She sat examining the things around her, the wall, the table, the ceiling. As the morning came on a soft rose crept into the sky. She went to the plastic window and stood watching the dawn.
This thing was going to happen.
The impossibility was fading now as the sun rose and the huts across the way stepped out of darkness. That old, that horrible thing, that dry, wrinkled thing....
She was too much afraid, and revolted, to cry. What followed now was an animal fear, an animal desperation, and for the first time she felt an urgent, vital energy gathering within her. She had to get out, she had to get away. This thing was unbelievable and could not happen at all, not ever, because she would not let it happen. She moved back from the window and began to pace her cage.
And the anger was replaced by a dissolving helplessness. She had no plan. She searched, thought desperately, pleaded with herself, but she had no plan. When they came all she could do would be fight, which would not be enough, and the thing would happen.
Eventually, because carrying this load in her mind was much too great, she tried at last to accept it. If she could just endure. She would have to shut off her mind, like a radio is shut off, and live inside herself, in silence.
She knew that would not work either.
By mid-morning it became obvious that the man was in no hurry, or was busy. He did not come after breakfast, and she waited out the morning. She was just beginning to begin to hope when two of the older men, the guards, came into the hut.
It was evidently a formal thing, this breeding. They took her clothes, gave her a single, pale yellow garment which reached not quite to her knees. She put it on. The two old men were dressed differently today, in soft pastel robes which were flowing and ridiculous around their spindly legs. She gathered that today there would be a celebration.
One of the old men gave her the needle as she stood dressing, before she had a chance to struggle. She was lain for the last time upon the floor, to wait for the evening.
And then, to her great amazement, a calm possession took over her. All the school girl fear and disgust and revulsion fell away for a moment, and she examined the situation critically.
What the hell, she said to herself, startled but at the same time pleased at the feel of strength in her.
What was this after all? This was sex, really, so what? It was going to happen? Well, let it happen. It happened to other women, and it had not killed them. Now it was going to happen to her, and she would certainly live through it, and since none of it was her fault, there was merely a physical thing that took place, like in the old days when girls were married against their will, so she guessed she could bear it.
She was shocked at herself. But she felt her sanity, which had slowly begun to slip away, return with a rush. Her youth did not return with it. She would have preferred to have her initiation take place in some other manner, certainly, with someone more suitable, and she knew that afterwards she might regret it all very much.
But she had a whole afternoon to pass lying flat on her back and thinking, and she passed the afternoon in growing up quickly, as countless women had done before her, helpless and alone, captured in wax by barbarian soldiers.
"I said this is Hilton, by God! Me. Web. Lieutenant Hilton!"
It was a little while, understandably, before Dundon got hold of the idea of the aliens. And then—also with great understanding—Web decided not to tell him the full story. Not over the phone. In person it would be bad enough, but over the phone it was too great an effort, and anyway, he was not really sure that he was himself. He told Dundon where he was.
"Chicago? Chicago? Chica—"
"That's right, chief. Chicago. You got it. I'm in the Statler Hotel. Incidentally, I need quite a buck to pay my way out. And if you will come here right away I will tell you what's up."
Dundon was still asking him about Chicago.
"At the Statler," Web insisted, "under my own name. Bring money. And bring an escort. Watch out for old men with sharp noses. What? We've been invaded. Yes, by little old men with sharp—look, chief, never mind, come out here and I'll tell you the whole thing."
With that he hung up.
At the thought of how Dundon must look, he grew cheerful for the first time since the whole business had begun. For a risingly happy moment he began to feel for once like his old gay carefree self.
I am going to wait, he said happily to himself, until the whole damn army gets here.
I am not going to move a foot. I will sleep and eat until the cows come home, I will load up on scotch and I will lock my door, because, by heck, I deserve it.
Because he had had little experience with hotel rooms, especially rooms of such a lavish nature, he did not think of room service. He strode through the door gaily whistling, and was halfway to the elevator when the orange flash cut him down.
Kunklin and Prule joined to rake in twelve more Faktors, and to dissolve Web once again.
"This is quite hard on the boy, really," Prule observed reproachfully.
Kunklin was unmoved. "He doesn't feel a thing. He will never know about it."
Prule agreed, but he was a sensitive man, and he sighed. And then he said:
"They found him with remarkable celerity, don't you think?"
"Tracing a Galactic—an unequipped Galactic—is not difficult. The wave length, of course."
"Yes, but they had no idea he was coming to this place."
"They certainly did. They expected him at the center of operations—which this town must obviously be—sooner or later. When their men did not return from the desert, or the town, they must have grown apprehensive."
"Well, anyway, we don't need this poor fellow anymore. Why don't we let him go, and mop up ourselves."
Kunklin grinned righteously.
"I'm a great believer in letting these people help themselves," he said. "It seems more sporting that way. He's doing fine so far. I think we ought to leave him in just to see how far he can go. Really, he does deserve to be in at the end."
"I suppose. But you know, we almost didn't finish that last recording in time."
It was a sobering thought.
"We'll have to follow him more closely," Kunklin said, beginning the work of assembly. "But after all, we're very near the end. I expect we will be going home—"
He broke off in mid-sentence as a tall, unusually symmetrical young woman walked leggily around the corner of the hall. Kunklin was invisible behind the warp shield, but although she could not see him he could clearly see her, and his eyebrows rose happily.
"Um," he began, "it begins to come home to me now why this planet is so well-visited. First this Earthman's father, then the Faktors—"
Prule cut him off. Kunklin was a first rate repairman, but he was also a first rate lecher, a trait he had carried to several harrowing extremes on other humanoid worlds, to Prule's almost Quakerian sorrow. Prule soberly pressed him back to work, to the messy job of assembling Web Hilton from the molecular recording.
And when Kunklin's head was down and busy, Prule's eyes quickly followed the pneumatic young lady as she walked down the carpeted hall.
And now Web was walking down a street in the black night, walking slowly, without purpose or direction or intelligence. He was aware of walking for quite some while, numbly, vacantly, as if he was rising from a long dark tunnel, before he reached the end and came suddenly alive.
He stopped in the center of the sidewalk.
It had happened again.
Bewildered, he looked around him. There was nothing about the street, about the long low rows of squat black houses, which was familiar. He had no reason of his own to come here; he was not even sure he was still in Chicago.
He put his hand to his forehead and rubbed his eyes. A feeling of great emptiness, of being utterly alone in an impossible world, swept through him. This time his memory went as far as the call to Dundon, no farther. He had begun to walk from the room, and it was as if he had walked off a cliff into nothing, into a cloud, and he had emerged from the other side still walking, only now he was walking on an unknown street. What happened in between was not in his mind. After a moment he did not try to remember, because there was not even an association. In that area his mind was totally empty.
He gathered himself quickly. There was a great drive inside him which all the years up to now had not really touched, but now he was beginning to feel himself move. He was confused. He was alone. But he was also becoming deeply angry. He was going to find out what had happened, was happening, and he would do it if it meant searching to the end of his life.
He walked quickly to the nearest corner.
The street he was on was Wingate Street.
Which was, he recalled instantly, the address of Albert Bosco.
So he had been directed here. The blank in his mind was not amnesia. Someone had guided his movements to Wingate Street, had picked him up out of the hotel like you pick up a toy train that has gone off the track.
His anger rose.
He would follow that trail, all right, and when he reached the end—
He began to look for the Doctor's house.
It was a high, narrow building near the end of the block. There was no light in any of the windows.
He strode up to the front door without hesitation, forcefully punched the bell.
Lights came on upstairs. Something came clumping down the hall toward the door, opened it.
Bosco was an old, old man in a shining bathrobe. In the light of the hall his alien nose was keen and obvious.
"Emergency," said Web quickly, "are you the Doctor?" He stepped inside the door before the old man, startled, could answer. He stood poised upon a thick carpet, listening for sounds from other parts of the house. The house was silent.
"I am Doctor Bosco," the old man said weakly, nervously, "what is it you want? Who sent you to me?"
"I need your help," Web said. He thought: this one doesn't know me. "Can you come?"
"But ... but ... but ... I do not leave this house. I am not ... I cannot go out. You will have to find someone else." He reached past Web to open the door again. Web decided to make his move.
The arm reached by him. He closed his hand upon the wrist.
The alien froze, stared with enormous horror straight up into his eyes. The wrist in Web's grip was remarkably gaunt and brittle. With a quick downward motion he could break it, and both of them knew it.
The old man started to back away, moaned once with a bubbling hum, and collapsed.
Web bent down to look at the man. He wasn't dead, but he was out cold. Scared damn near to death. Web was amused, grinned once very swiftly. If this was a sample, these aliens weren't much.
He picked up the old man, light and wispy as a bundle of leaves, and carried him under one arm into the big living room which opened off of the hall. He thought better of turning on a light, slumped the old man on a couch and sat down beside him.
A street bulb outside the house threw a white soft glow of light into the room. That was enough to see by for his purposes. He moved over on the couch to a position from which he could see the door. And then, in darkness, he waited.
It was several minutes before the old man moved. Web had time to think, to form a plan. The first thing that moved in Web's mind was a wonder of why in heck the old man should have fainted, and then it occurred to him that this thing here was alien, truly alien, and probably had a science so far beyond ours as to be impossible to comprehend. He would undoubtedly be long-lived. Web thought; could just as well be immortal.
But anyway, no matter what else he was, it was pretty sure that he lived a long while, and death, any death, was a rare thing among his people. Hence the unusual, to an Earthman, fear of dying. It figured. Humans fear dying all right. But a lot of them face it every day as part of their jobs, because life on Earth must be something like a jungle compared to the germ-free, war-free, super-sanitary world of the future. Death to a man like this would be quite a fearful thing.
And so the collapse.
And a weapon for Web.
He smiled in the darkness, cruelly, as the alien stirred. He would find out from this man whatever he wanted to know.
Awake at last, with Web above him like a huge black mountain, the old man nearly fainted again. But he managed to recover slowly, in a state of really pitiful terror. He had known from the beginning that Web was not a Galactic—a Galactic would never have approached in person. The thought helped him to survive. But even then this Earthman was a barbarian, an unaccountable man with no scruples against killing, and Web was perfectly right about the fear of death. The alien talked.
For a while he babbled, but then it began to make sense.
He told about the coming extinction of his race, and the plan for interbreeding which would save it. He had been on Earth, he said, for several years, choosing specimens for test purposes. The tests had proved positive and the first step of selection was almost completed. He had been stationed as a real doctor with a real practice, so that he would have the opportunity of giving preliminary physical examinations and passing on the names of potentially acceptable candidates. And there were many doctors like him spread all over the world. Since the United States was by far the Earth's healthiest country of any size, most of the selecting had been done right here.
"But what did you do with the men in the satellite?" Web asked, doing his best to follow but fast losing ground.
"How did you know—?" And then the alien almost collapsed again. He had heard, undoubtedly, of the one man that had escaped from the satellite. But that had been a Galactic—
"Why did you do that, kill all those men, and how?"
Web shook him, the alien yelped feebly, then babbled it out.
"The satellite was in a very dangerous position. It could see all our intercontinental travel, the ships we have going and coming daily. It would undoubtedly warn the planet of what it saw. But we could not simply destroy it. Blame for that might conceivably be placed on your enemies, and you are such unstable peop—that is—we—there was no need for a general war. We could not risk that, being ourselves just as vulnerable to atomic attack as any life. So we—removed the men on the satellite."
"How, dammit, how?"
When he swore the alien jumped.
"Through devices which you—if you do not already know, you cannot be—oh—yes—I will tell, I will tell—" The old man searched desperately for an explanation. "Your body has—every body is held together by electric forces. By million upon millions of tiny electric currents. The atoms of any body are kept in position by a—by an attraction between them. Now, if that attraction is nullified, the atoms will drift apart, disperse. The atoms will no longer exist in any form. That was what happened to the men in the satellite. They were—turned off."
Web sat perfectly still for a long moment. Then he said swiftly, viciously:
"But why didn't it get me?"
The alien writhed on the couch.
"Your blood must be different. We thought you were a Galactic. Your body chemistry is unusual, your—your charge is different."
Once again Web sat in silence, trying to follow that. Galactic and different blood. But he wrenched his mind away. The sun would be up soon and he would have to be out of here quickly. He would need to know where their main base was. Then it was the army's turn. Although what could the army do?
He got the location out of the old man. It was surprisingly near to Chicago.
And the time of the first take-off, the first shipment, would be that night.
He rose to leave. Then he turned back to the old man.
He debated it for a moment, but saw nothing else possible. The old man knew who he was and where he was going, and what he knew. He could not leave the old man to warn the others. The old man knew that too, looked up at him and saved him the trouble.
He died just before Web's great hands reached him.
VII
Within the next hour he had a gun, taken from an amiable but unfortunate young cop who had the courtesy to stop and give him a match on a dark back street. He was sincerely sorry for that, knowing what would happen to the cop, but he was also acutely aware that he needed the gun a hell of a lot more than the cop did, even if this was Chicago.
Later on, when the sun was up, he reconsidered. It occurred to him that where he was going noise would be no virtue, not if he was going in alone. So he bought himself a knife—Bowie, with a double edged tip. Anyway, he had been schooled in knives in jump school, and he knew how to use one even better than a wild .45. The thing to do now was get within reach.
A cab took him to the bus terminal. It was a beautiful morning, brisk and clear and cold, and on the way he picked up three Faktors.
At discreet intervals, they followed him into the terminal. He did not notice them. They ringed him at a distance, following a set plan of destruction, prepared to close in. Since there had been no time for another recording, Kunklin and Prule had no choice. The three Faktors died at once, in their tracks, in separate parts of the waiting room.
It was a short while before the slumping men were noticed and the uproar began. By that time Web was outside boarding a bus, and he went on his way knowing nothing at all of the Faktors, nor of the unfortunate incident that immediately befell the Galactics.
He rode the bus for two hours. As he got nearer and nearer to his destination his resolve began to slip away. He was utterly alone, and these enemies were alien. What in heck could he accomplish?
The bus pulled into a town called Alford just before noon. He stepped down into the quiet street. There were no aliens around, none that he could tell. He decided that there was probably no sense in waiting for the dark. He did not know his way and the layout would be important, so he decided to go up into the hills right away.
It was a long walk. He stayed with the road for about two miles, then cut off abruptly into the woods. The ground became steeper, he began to climb.
He had not gone forty feet before he tripped the first alarm.
The catastrophe, which neither Kunklin nor Prule had anticipated, occurred as the result of a power failure.
Continued operation of the machine known as the "bender," together with the enormous power drain of the anti-gravity webs they used to float back and forth, had sapped the power of their suits down below danger level. The one last burst which destroyed the three Faktors reduced that power completely.
Both Kunklin and Prule became immediately visible.
They caused quite a stir.
Dressed as they were in white, satin-like suits, with glass bowl helmets on their heads and a large back pack sprouting antennae in all directions, they were an instantaneous focus of interest in the bus terminal.
They were greatly annoyed, and also somewhat embarrassed.
"Galactic obscenity," said Kunklin, as a crowd gathered, "I thought you recharged the suits."
"I thought you did," muttered Prule anxiously. "But let's get out of here. Which way is the ship?"
They began to walk forward toward the door and the curious, grinning crowd parted.
"It's way down this wide street. Oh fine!" Kunklin swore gloomily, attempting at the same time to keep his face impassive. Fortunately, Earthmen were humanoid. If they were not, of course, the Galactics would never have allowed this to happen. And if experience on other planets of this culture level was any judge, these people here would think the Galactics and the suits were some kind of stunt. But though this accident had happened quite often to other Galactic agents, it had never happened to them, and they were apprehensive. They eyed the crowd warily as they walked.
Grinning, giggling, pointing, the crowd eyed them back, and followed.
Out into the street they went, two tall, undeniably weird-looking men unable to keep their embarrassment from their faces. One wide-eyed little boy ran up to Prule, grabbed at his sleeve with taffy-smeared fingers. He chirped loudly to his parents to "looka the space men." The mother came up, politely disengaged his fingers, gave a smiling, unintelligible apology to Prule. Prule nodded as graciously as he could, tried to walk faster.
"Listen," Prule groaned, "the power is too low to work the translator. Suppose we're stopped? We can't talk to them."
"Here comes one in a uniform," said Kunklin, beginning to perspire.
"Police?"
"Yes."
"I suggest we run."
They broke into a trot. The crowd around them had grown rapidly and began to trot with them, wondering where the show would take place. The policeman ran too.
They let out their speed. Now a whole host of people began to shout and new ones joined them, running, as they crossed a main street against a light.
"Faster," grunted Kunklin.
Prule swore. "I can't. The suit's too heavy."
"Just a little way. When we get to the ship we'll put on a demonstration."
They tore down the avenue, narrowly evading children, old ladies, and newsstands. Two more blue-coated officials joined in the chase, converging and blowing whistles. Several more were coming up in front of them when they finally reached the ship.
They stopped in the center of the wide street. Traffic screeched to a halt on all sides.
"Are you sure it's here?"
Kunklin looked around uneasily, then spied the faint hazy circle of the opening, several feet in the air above them. He pushed at his anti-gravity knob, felt himself lightening, but not lifting. He swore.
The crowd was reaching them, small boys and men lurched to a stop around them.
"They're waiting for us to do something," Prule hissed.
"Quick! Before the police get here! Jump!"
Prule looked up helplessly at the hazy circle.
"How"—he began, but Kunklin pushed him aside, assumed a broad stance in the center of the crowd. He thrust his arms outward dramatically, as if for silence. Just then the first cop broke through and into the center of the circle and began to speak virtuously, angrily, in the manner of cops, but the people around him were staring at Kunklin and waiting expectantly.
"Well," said Kunklin, speaking cheerfully in Galactic, "it's been fun." He threw the anti-gravity to full power, waited till he could feel that the lift would no longer increase. It was not enough to get him off the ground, but he now weighed next to nothing. He crouched, then leaped for the haze above. He shot up like a rocket, went through the circle and disappeared.
A moment later Prule followed him. As he sailed up through the haze the ship became immediately visible above, he reached out and caught on to a rung of the ladder below Kunklin. Thankfully, wearily, not bothering to look down at the stunned, open-mouthed crowd which he could see below him but which could no longer see him, he followed Kunklin up into the ship.
Kunklin did not wait at the airlock, he ran quickly away. Prule, puffing, paused to look down at last on the crowd below. Their ascent had been a success. The crowd was beginning to applaud.
Prule closed the airlock and the invisible, untouchable ship lifted. He went to join Kunklin. The big Galactic was bent over the controls, guiding the ship not upward—as Prule had thought—but horizontally down the length of the wide street.
"Eh?" said Prule.
"Got to get a live Faktor," Kunklin said anxiously, his eyes glued to the viewscreen. "We've lost the Earthman. He could be anywhere now, and we can't help him. He may be headed for the Faktor's main base. If so he will be killed. We've got to get to the base first."
Prule pursed his lips. "If he dies on our account, just because of your foolish idea to use him—"
"I know," Kunklin cut in. "So we need a Faktor to tell us where the base is. They're probably all over this city. I think I even saw one in the crowd." He stopped. "That's another thing," he said unhappily, "if there were Faktors in the crowd, they'll know a Galactic ship is here."
Prule grunted, peered down at the left side of the screen.
"Look, isn't that one?"
He indicated a small, furtive-looking man who was walking swiftly away from the area they had just left.
Kunklin adjusted for a close view.
"Yep." He moved to the instrument panel, worked carefully at a traversing mechanism. "Get down to the airlock. We'll suck him up."
"He'll die of fright," Prule predicted. "They always do."
Kunklin shrugged. "We have to try. Maybe this will be a strong one."
"Let's hope so."
Prule readied himself at the open airlock. Kunklin threw a switch, there was a deep, subtle hum, and a magnetic beam dosed down on the man below. He flipped straight up toward the ship, like a hooked minnow.
But he was not one of the stronger Faktors. He was dead before he reached the door.
In the late afternoon, when the wind had died and the day was quiet, the door opened.
The same two men—she had begun to be able to tell them apart—came in and, this time, bowed.
Ivy yawned, rose up on an elbow and blinked her eyes.
The two men, surprised, stared at her.
"All right, what is it?" Ivy said as briskly as she could, trying to force down the sudden fear. "Stop that damned bowing. A sillier bunch of skinny idiots I never saw. Men! Huh! You're dying out, all right, that's obvious."
The two men looked at each other. Then one of them recaptured his grin.
"It is time for your breeding," he said lecherously.
Ivy yawned again, started to rise.
"Okay, I'll be with you in a minute. I hope it doesn't take too long. I've lost a lot of sleep."
She managed to stand up calmly, with composure. The only thing she could think of to do now was to regard this whole thing lightly, and to make an occasional remark about the rather obvious defects of her captors.
There was no sense in collapsing.
The two men, puzzled, followed her with their eyes as she fluffed up her hair.
"No need of that," one of them said quickly, "you will be prepared by others."
Ivy let her hair fall. "Okay Oscar. Whatever you say." In a very unladylike manner, she yawned again, scratched herself. She grinned at them both.
"I don't mean to be nasty, fellas, but why don't you pull up a chair for a minute? Old guys like you shouldn't be running around all day—"
The near one growled. The other one restrained him, smiled thinly.
"We have no need of rest," he said slowly. "We possess a certain—vitality." His smile broadened. "As you shall presently see for yourself."
Ivy did not look at him, walked suddenly past him and out the door.
They made a motion to grab her, but held back as she stopped. She stood in the afternoon sun and stretched lazily.
"To your left," the man behind her said.
She waited for a moment, and then she walked. She strode upon bare ground, upon soft grass, unable to be flippant now, looking stiffly ahead toward a flat gray building. The door was open and she could see the far wall, which was richly hung and colored in a strange deep red. The two men left her at the door, where another man, very old and white gowned and prissy, took her by the arm.
The man prepared her. She dropped all pretense at hardness, at disinterest, and sat like a stone. In with the other, the breeder, she would have to be icy. She became vaguely aware of a thick fragrance around her, a musky, oily smell. Then the man released her. She was prepared. He stood her up, waved at the door at the far end of the room.
"There," he said without interest, turning away.
She took a deep breath and walked forward.
It was a long way up and Web went most of the way at a crouch, the knife and the gun both ready at his belt. He had taken off his coat and tie; it was chilly in the woods but he did not feel it.
Four miles north of Alford, the old man had said. Just a half mile off the highway, on the tallest hill, the really steep one. He kept the highway to his right going up, beginning to wonder at last if the alien had told the truth. For all he knew, the camp might really be in northern Tibet, and he could be stealing his way ever so stealthily through total emptiness. But no. The old man had been scared to death. Literally. And anyway, the thing he was walking into was undoubtedly a trap, and knowing it did not do much good.
He cleared the first rise and climbed in among some rocks. Nearby below he could see the highway, empty. The sun was high in the afternoon. Four miles was not a long way, even crouching, and he could probably make it before dark. In the dark shadows of the bushes around him, nothing moved. He went up the next hill.
When he reached the top he was beginning to perspire. He sat down for a moment to think.
Now that he was close and the moment of contact was so near he could almost touch it, his mind began to function with a cold, comforting clarity. It was time to make a plan. His target was the ship, yes, but he would have to proceed on the assumption that they knew he was coming. They would have some kind of warning system, and a variety of weapons. But for the time being he held the ace.
He grinned cheerlessly to himself and headed for the next rise.
On the other side of this one there was a long flat space, scrub-bushed and empty, and then the last hill, the steep one, began. He went forward across the open space in broad daylight. He felt like he was walking into the mouth of a primed cannon. In effect, he was.
It was in among a clump of pines, silent and green, that the thing fell to the ground near him. He froze, momentarily panic-stricken, his hand to his belt. The fallen thing lay on the ground a few inches from his right hand, stiff and unmoving, dark among the leaves.
He relaxed slightly.
It was only a bird.
A dead bird. He stared at it for a long while, motionless. Out of the trees above him a dead bird had fallen.
Coincidence?
Or were they now turning on the power?
He lay flat on the ground. They knew where he was and they did not like it. They had fired on him. He did not know whether the thing that killed the bird had missed him, or whether it had hit him too and his incredible immunity had protected him. Perhaps they had already fired on him with the other gun, the one from the satellite. He did not know that either. But in front of him lay the dead bird.
And now, if he tripped another electronic eye, they would probably come out in person.
All for the best. He peered intently through the trees up the hill, searching for some sign of buildings. If he could get to the edge of a clearing, could see, he would stand a better chance. But there was nothing but bushes, the bare brown shafts of trees. Now that they knew where he was, he was deeply thankful that he'd had the sense to bring the gun.
He moved forward on his hands and knees, watching, listening, praying that he didn't trip another eye.
The bushes crackled around him. The wind, dammit.
He stopped and listened, heard his heart beating in his throat. He decided he could crawl just as well with one hand, so he took out the gun. It was at that moment that he saw the first Faktor.
An instant silhouette through the trees ahead, moving silently toward him. They were coming.
He dropped to his stomach, crawled with a cold silent slide into the nearest bush clump. Although they probably knew to the foot where he was, he had to lie still.
In a brief, brutal flash of reproach and disgust, he realized what an idiot he'd been to come out here alone.
But there was no helping that now. He moved down behind a fallen log, laid the barrel of the .45 on the trunk and sighted through the leaves.
Now he could hear them. They were small, but sloppy. Maybe they didn't care. That didn't figure. But by now they had undoubtedly understood his immunity, were coming to kill him in the bloody ways of Earth.
He had no way of knowing that the Faktors had been terrified to realize that a Galactic was approaching, but immensely relieved to see that the Galactic was afoot. To the Faktors, Web was one of two things: a hybrid, or a stranded Galactic. For no agent would ever approach on foot, not in his right mind. Short of a force field, no armor known will stop a high velocity missile. And a Galactic on foot could not have that.
The killing of a Galactic was a rare thing, a delectable thing. Seven Faktors converged on Web.
He let them come in very close, counting them and noting their positions, before he fired. When the nearest man was ten yards away, crawling toward Web at an angle, the white round eyes looked past him. In the last second he saw that they were circling the wrong spot. They had not expected his sideward movement. He fired.
The heavy police bullet caught the Faktor in the head. He died where he lay, instantly. There were swift, rising, horribly frightened screams from the bushes around him.
Web rolled back from the log, crawled around to the other side of the tree. The god-awful things were whimpering.
He peered furtively around the tree looking for another shot while the shooting was good, wondering how in hell they'd ever gotten the nerve to come in after him. And then he looked at the body of the alien he'd killed, saw the small brown bomb in his hand, and knew.
They'd never intended to get in close. They probably hadn't even expected him to be armed.
He grinned viciously, turning his head the while to look for a way out.
In that instant he saw another alien move. He fired.
The shot went home. There were more screams.
Good God, he said, almost aloud, shocked. He did not fire again, the fear of the things was revolting. He wanted to get out.
He started to move, but they located him. The first bomb hit on the other side of the tree, blew with a white blinding flash, a thin, screaming, ripping explosion.
The tree saved him. He fell flat, tried to crawl away. Two more bombs let go on the other side of the tree, spattered among the bushes and leaves, cut the tree in half. The tree fell in the direction of another bomb, the top of it was blown away. In frantic desperation, the Faktors were giving it everything they had.
There was a tense moment of silence. Web started to rise. He had to get away. He fired again and again into the woods around him, rose and started to run, hoping that the shooting would keep the aliens flat, that some of them at least had died of fear and that he could outrun them. He made it as far as another fallen log before the next bomb let go, giving him a great crunching shove in his back. He fell face down over the log.
Oh hell, he said painfully, oh hell oh hell oh hell. A bomb fell near him, and another, and he turned to rise and fire back just once more, swearing, his flesh rising to greet the one last killing explosion, and damn it all, he was going to die.
A huge fist hit him squarely between the eyes. He fell over backwards.
And there was dark, blessed silence.
The doors opened automatically when Prule pushed the right button. Three hundred and twelve young girls and two hundred and fourteen young men, all of them the cream of Earth's children and most of them mother-naked, peered out cautiously, furtively, into the gathering dusk. One made a move, then another. A rather brazen young woman, nude, walked right out into the center of the camp. And then they all emerged, wide-eyed and taut, looking for the Faktors.
"All gone," said Kunklin, waving his hands expressively. But since his suit was recharged and working, nobody saw him.
They did not see the Faktors either. They began to gather and talk with each other, some dangerously close to shock, some excitedly none the worse for wear. Most of the women were recovered so far as to return to modesty, began to search for covering.
This did not please Kunklin at all. He was tempted to push the button again and close all the doors, thereby making all clothing unavailable, but—after a thoughtful look at Prule—he let it go. It had been an extraordinary sight, a delectable sight, and his opinion of the virtues of Earth was skyrocketing.
Right then and there Kunklin decided the spot for his next vacation.
And now at last, as they watched, the men and the girls began to leave. It was growing dark and quite cold and they could not stay here. One by one, in varying degrees of undress, they strode off down the mountain. The sensation they created in Alford was nothing next to the sensation they created the next day, in newspapers the world over.
Kunklin watched them go with mixed torture and delight.
Prule brought him back to the next order of business.
"The Earthman," he said gloomily.
"Um?"
"The man from the satellite. Where is he?"
"Um," said Kunklin, sobering. "Where is he indeed?"
Prule pointed a lean finger at the near woods.
"There were explosions going on over there when we flew down. I suppose—" he fixed his eyes reproachfully on Kunklin—"they bombed him."
Kunklin shrugged. "The man came all the way up here. Really. You know, you have to admire these people, in more ways than one. I—"
He broke off.
For out of the woods, stumbling, holding his head in one hand and his colt .45 in the other, came the great battered figure of Web Hilton. He was scarred and bloody, one eye was closed and he walked with a heavy limp, but he was walking at least, and Kunklin brightened.
"Well by Jupiter, he made it!"
Prule smiled happily.
"We must have just got here in time. The Faktors were probably bombing him when they disappeared."
"Yes, yes. Well, well, well." Kunklin fussed with a knob, turned off his bender and switched on the translator. "I suppose, now that it's all over, we owe this fellow an explanation. Lord, man, we owe him more than that. He's one of us!" He started walking quickly toward Web. "Ho! Hey! You there!"
Web stopped, peered confusedly through bleary eyes at the incredible figures on the mountain side before him. His gun was in his hand, but he had forgotten it. He had not yet collected himself and there was an awful ringing in his head.
Kunklin and Prule surrounded him, babbling away cheerfully, set him down and gave him first aid. In an astonishingly short time he was feeling well again and the Galactics did their best to bring him up to date on what had occurred, being careful to praise his undeniable courage in the face of such odds. They admitted to using him as decoy, but told him nothing about the recording business. They saw no reason to tell this boy that he had, during the course of recent events, died twice. No telling how he would react. Although really, since he was atom for atom identical with the original Web Hilton, what difference did it make?
"—and so we finally found a Faktor with some strength of will—had to inject the man as he came aboard—then came out here and eliminated the rest of them."
Web stared dazedly around at the empty buildings.
"All gone?"
"Completely." Kunklin grinned. "We used the same device on them that they used on your people. We thought it only fitting. Quite a weapon. Used to be the most dangerous weapon in this part of the universe until we found immunity. You could wipe out whole planets without a single leaf being harmed—"
"Yes, yes," said Prule, "but the job is ended. Thank you my friend. You have been of great help. Any time you need us. Kunklin?"
"What?" said Kunklin, straightening. "You mean leave him here? Well really, Prule, that's hardly—" And then his whole face brightened. He clapped Web heavily on the back. "Why Prule, this boy's a Galactic! After all he's done for us, the least we can do is take him back with us"—Prule jumped—"to headquarters, at least, and introduce him around. Why, the boy has a heritage! You can see that from the way he held up his end. Oh yes, yes, we'll have to take him back."
Web looked up blearily, beginning to understand.
"Back where?"
But Kunklin reached down and took him by the arm, and began leading him toward the ship. He explained, as painlessly as he could, the fact of Web's Galactic parentage. He did not say that it was Web's father—which, for biological reasons, it had to be—but only that some ancestor, somewhere along the line, had been extraterrestrial.
And while Web was downing that, and Prule was protesting, Kunklin spoke gaily on.
"You'll need time, my boy, won't you, before you come along with us? You'll need time, eh?"
"I have to see Dundon—"
"Of course, of course," Kunklin chuckled, "take all the time you want. Take weeks, take months. And in the meantime," he grinned toward Prule, in whom just now a great light was dawning—"in the meantime Prule and I will wander the byroads of your lovely planet. Eh, Prule? A vacation!"
And in a mood of genial lechery—for Earthman, Galactic, Faktor, this one thing is constant—the three men climbed into the ship, and then, the sky.
Ivy Jean Thompson, to complete the story in the coldest of truth, never set eyes on Web Hilton in her life. And if she had, it would have made little difference, for the fact of the matter is that Ivy Jean Thompson had had quite enough of men. Any kind of men. The disappearance of the Faktors had occurred, coincidentally, at the last possible moment for the saving of Ivy's virtue. It was, understandably, an unnerving experience.
She opened her eyes to find nobody there. She left the camp firmly convinced that there should never be anybody there. She retired to a small town in north Jersey where she became a particularly grouchy librarian spinster, the last of all the casualties in the case of the Blood Brother.