Invaders From Earth

14

The corporation spaceship had not been intended as a prison ship, and so they had no facilities for confining him. Not that Kennedy was anxious to mingle with the men of the crew; reserved, aloof, a little shocked despite himself at the magnitude of what he had done, he rarely left the hammock during the long, tense trip back to Earth. He spent much of his time reading and as much as possible sleeping, or thinking about the Ganymedean culture of which he had had such a brief, tantalizing glimpse.

He ate alone, and spoke to the other men aboard the ship only when necessary. They spoke to him not at all.

The last few days before the departure of the supply ship had been unpleasant ones. Gunther had ordered Kennedy confined to the bare little dungeon-storeroom, with a guard constantly posted outside the door and meals brought in.

Gunther had questioned him.

“You’re accused on two counts. You gave weapons to the aliens and you murdered Engel. Right?”

“I decline to answer that.”

“The hell with that. Confess.”

“I’m not confessing to hogwash like that. And don’t threaten to have me shot, Gunther. The agency knows I’m here.”

“It could be an accident—a man cleaning his rifle. But I won’t do it. Let the Corporation take care of you. You’re not my responsibility. You go back to Earth when the ship leaves.”

“As you please,” Kennedy said.

“But I want a confession. Tell me why you gave guns to the Gannys!”

“I didn’t. The Gannys wouldn’t know how to use them. And you killed Engel yourself, when we tried to get away.”

“Who’ll believe that? Come on, Kennedy—confess.”

Kennedy shrugged and refused. After a while, Gunther gave up.

He had to admit to himself they were taking special care of him. Another man might have killed him on the spot, as a safety measure; Gunther was too smart for that. After all, Kennedy was an agency executive. This was too big a thing for Gunther to handle, and he knew it. He was tossing it back to the Corporation, letting them judge Kennedy and decide what to do with him.

Sizer let him have a gravanol pill on the way out, which surprised him a little; it was reasonable to expect that they’d leave a traitor to cope with the agonies of blast-off acceleration as best he could, without proffering the assistance of the pain-killing drug. They gave it to him, though, silently and ungraciously, but readily enough.

He had never been a particularly thoughtful man. Intelligent, yes; quick-witted, yes; resourceful, yes. But thinking —evaluation of himself in relation to the world about him, understanding of the sea of events through which he moved—thinking had never been his strong point, as Marge had so frequently let him know. But now he had plenty of time to think, as the Corporation ship left the icy ball that was Ganymede far behind and coasted on toward Earth.

They had taught him many things at Northwestern; he had responded to tutorial prodding magnificently, coming through with straight A averages for the entire four years. But no one had ever taught him where his loyalties belonged. And he had never bothered to find out.

It was a world he had never made—but one that had given him thirty thousand a year at the biggest public relations firm there was, and he’d been content. He could have left well enough alone, he thought.

The day of Earthfall came. Word passed rapidly through the ship, and Sizer, grim-faced now, with none of the cheerful affability of the earlier journey, came aft to offer Kennedy a gravanol pill. He accepted the pellet and the flask and nodded his thanks to Sizer. The Spaceman left.

Kennedy looked carefully around, making sure no one was watching him. A wild plan was forming in his mind. He palmed the little pill and drained the flask of water; then he slumped back in the hammock as if drugged. He slipped the pill into his pocket.

Deceleration began.

He rode down into the atmospheric blanket fully conscious, the only man on the ship who was awake. The ship’s jets thundered, stabilizing her, decelerating her. Kennedy felt as if two broad hands were squeezing him together, jamming his neck against his spine, flattening his face, distorting his mouth. He could hear the currents of blood in his body. He gasped for breath like a hooked fish. It seemed that there was a mighty knuckle pressing against his chest, expelling the air from his lungs, keeping him from drawing breath.

He drew a breath. And another.

He swung in the cradle. Waves of pain shivered through him.

He started to blank out. He fought it, clinging tightly to consciousness.

And he stayed awake.

The ship was trembling, shuddering in the last moments before landing. He did not look out the viewplate, but he knew the ground must be visible now, pitching wildly beneath the ship. He could picture the sleek vessel standing perched on a tongue of fire.

They dropped down. Kennedy wiped a trickle of blood from his upper lip. He became abruptly aware of a roaring silence, and realized that the bellow of the jets had at last ceased.

They had landed. And he had not blanked out.

Now he rolled over and looked through the port as he began to unfasten himself. He saw people out there. A welcoming committee? He looked for Marge or Watsinski or Spalding, but saw no one he recognized, no familiar face. He blinked again, realizing the field was empty. Those were just maintenance men. The ship had returned under wraps of secrecy.

What a blaster of a dream that was, he thought, and in the same moment he realized that it was no dream. He had spent three weeks on another world; he had discovered that the values he held to be true were false, and that the cause he had lent himself to was dedicated to wiping out a culture that had incredibly much to offer Earth. The Corporation did not hate the Gannys. They merely stood in the way of making profit, and so they had to go.

A voice said quietly inside him, If you run fast enough they can’t touch you. It’s not too late. You didn’t commit any crime by talking to the Gannys. The Corporation hasn’t started making the law yet, dammit. Not yet.

The big hatch in the wall of the ship was opening, and a catwalk was extruding itself automatically so the men in the ship could reach the ground twenty feet below. Very carefully Kennedy unlaced the webbing that held him in the deceleration cradle. He dropped one foot over the side of the hammock, then the other, and went pitching forward suddenly as the wall of the ship came sweeping up to meet him.

He thrust out his hands desperately, slapped them against the wall, steadied himself. He waited a moment until his head stopped pounding and his feet were less rubbery: He glanced fore and saw the other crewmen still slumped in their cradles, groggy from the gravanol pills. It would be a few minutes yet before they awakened. And they never would have expected their prisoner to have risked, and made, a fully conscious landing.

Kennedy smiled. Quite calmly he made his way forward to the hatch and lowered himself down the catwalk to the ground. Someone in the ship yawned; they were beginning to stir.

The sun was warm and bright. He had forgotten the day, but he knew it would have to be somewhere near the end of July. The sickly heat of midsummer hung over the flat grounds of the landing field.

A few maintenance men were moving toward the ship now, but they ignored him. Somehow he had expected welcomers, video cameras, a galaxy of flash bulbs—not an empty field. But the Corporation had probably preferred a veil of secrecy cast over the arrival.

He made his way across the field and into the area beyond. He spied a taxi passing on the road and hailed it. He felt dazed by the heat after the chill of Ganymede, and the punishment of landing had left him wobbly.

He opened the taxi and slipped into the passenger’s seat. He glanced out the window and looked back at the space-field. By now they were awake aboard the ship, and knew he was missing.

“Step on it, driver. Take me to the city.”

The cab rolled away. Kennedy wondered if he would be followed. It had been so simple to slip away, in the confusion of landing. One of the Ganny maxims he had learned was that through endurance of pain comes knowledge of truth, and therefore freedom. Well, he had endured pain and he had his freedom as a result of it. The unused gravanol pill was still in his pocket.

He had slipped away from them. Like in a dream, he thought, where the figures reach out to clutch you but you slip through them like a red-hot blade through butter.

They would hunt him, of course. Escape could never be this simple; the Corporation would spare no expense to get him and put him away. But if he only had a few days of freedom to accomplish some of the things he had to do, he would be content. Otherwise his surrender would have been pointless; he might just as well have spent his days as a fugitive on Ganymede.

Where can I go? he wondered.

Home?

Home was the most obvious place. So obvious, in fact, that his pursuers might never suspect he would go there. Yes. Home was best. He gave the cabby the address and lapsed back into sullen somnolence for the rest of the trip.

The house looked unusually quiet, he thought, as the cab pulled into the Connecticut township where he and Marge had lived so long.

Maybe Gunther had radioed ahead. Maybe they had intentionally let him slip away at the spaceport, knowing that they could always pick him up at home.

He gave the driver much too big a bill and without waiting for change headed up the drive into his garden.

He found his key in his trouser pocket, pressed it into the slot, and held his right thumb against the upper thumb-plate until the front door slid back. He stepped inside.

“Marge?”

No answer. He half-expected an answering rattle of gunfire or the sudden appearance of the Corporation gendarmerie, but the house remained silent. Only the steady purr of the electronic dust-eater was audible. He went on into the living room, hoping at least to find the cat sleeping in the big armchair, but there was no cat. Everything was tidy and in its place. The windows were opaqued.

The windows were opaqued! Kennedy felt a twinge of shock. They never opaqued the windows except when they expected to be away for long periods of time, on vacations, long shopping tours. Marge would never have left the windows opaqued in the middle of the day like that—

Suspicion began to form. He saw a piece of paper sitting on the coffee-table in the living room. He picked it up.

It was a note, in Marge’s handwriting, but more shaky than usual. All it said was, Ted, there’s a tape on the recorder. Please listen to it, Marge.

His hands trembled slightly as he switched on the sound system and activated the tape recorder. He waited a moment for the sound to begin.

“Ted, this is Marge speaking to you—for what’s going to be the last time. I was going to put this in the form of a note, but I thought using the recorder would let me make things a little clearer.

“Ted, I’m leaving. It’s not a hasty step. I thought about it a long time, and when this Ganymede business came up everything seemed to crystallize. We just shouldn’t be living together. Oh, it was nice at times—don’t get me wrong. But there’s such a fundamental difference in our outlook toward things that a break had to be made—now, before it was too late to make it.

“You worked on the Ganymede thing casually, light-heartedly, and didn’t even realize that I was bitterly opposed to it. Things like that. I’m not leaving because of a difference in politics, or anything else. Let’s just say that the Ganymede job was a symptom, not a cause, of the trouble in our marriage. I hated the contract and what it stood for. You didn’t even bother to examine the meaning of it. So today—the day you left for space, Ted—I’m leaving.

“I’m going away with Dave Spalding. Don’t jump to conclusions, though—I wasn’t cheating on you with Dave. I have my code and I live by it. But we did discuss the idea of going away together, and your leaving for Ganymede has made it possible. That’s why I wanted you to go. Please don’t be hurt by all this—please don’t smash things up and curse. Play the tape a couple of times, and think about things. I don’t want anything that’s in the house; I took what I wanted to keep, the rest is yours. After you’ve had time to get used to everything I’ll get in touch with you about the divorce.

“So that’s it, Ted. It was grand while it lasted, but I knew it couldn’t stay grand much longer, and to spare both of us fifty or sixty years of bitterness, I’ve pulled out. Dave has left the agency, but we have a little money that we’ve both saved. Again, Ted, I’m sorry, sorry for both of us.

“I left the cat with the Camerons, and you can get him back from them when you get back from Ganymede. Nobody but you and Dave and me knows what’s happened. Take care of yourself, Ted. And so long.”

He let the tape run down to the end and shut it off. Then he stood numbly in the middle of the room for a long while, and after that he played the tape over once again from the beginning to end.

Marge. Dave Spalding. And the cat was with the Camerons.

“I didn’t expect that, Marge,” he said quietly. His throat felt very dry. His eyes ached; but he did not cry at all.