The Silent Invaders

ONE

The prime-class starship Lucky Lady came thundering out of overdrive half a million miles from Earth, and phased into the long, steady ion-drive glide at Earth-norm gravitation toward the orbiting depot. In his second-class cabin aboard the starship, the man whose papers said he was Major Abner Harris of the Interstellar Development Corps stared anxiously, critically, at his face in the mirror. He was checking, for what must have been the hundredth time, to make sure that there was no sign of where his tendrils once had been.

There was, of course, no sign. He looked the very image of an Earthman.

He smiled; and the even-featured, undistinguished face the medics had put on him drew back, lips rising obediently in the corners, cheeks tightening, neat white teeth momentarily on display. It was a good smile; an Earthman’s smile down to the last degree.

Major Harris scowled, and the face darkened as a scowling face should darken.

The face behaved well. The synthetic white skin acted as if it were his own. The surgeons back on Darruu had done their usual superb job on him. His appearance was a triumph of the art.

They had removed the fleshy four-inch-long tendrils that sprouted at every Darruui’s temples; they had covered his deep golden-hued skin with an overlay of convincingly Terran white, and grafted it so skillfully that by now it had become his real skin.

Contact lenses had turned his eyes from their normal red to a Terran blue-gray. Hormone treatments had caused hair to sprout on head and body, thick Earthman hair where none had been before. The surgeons had not meddled with his internal plumbing, because that was too great a task even for their skill. Inwardly he remained alien, with the efficient Darruui digestive organ where a Terran had so many incredible feet of intestine, and with the double heart and the sturdy liver just back of his three lungs.

Inside he was alien. Behind the walls of his skull, he was Aar Khülom of the city of Helasz—a Darruui of the highest class, a Servant of the Spirit. But he had to forget his Darruui identity now, he had to cloak himself in the Earthman identity he wore. He was not Aar Khülom, he told himself doggedly, but Major Abner Harris.

He knew Major Harris’ biography in the greatest detail, and reviewed it constantly, so that it lay beneath the conscious part of his mind like the hidden nine-tenths of an iceberg, ready to come automatically to use when needed in an emergency.

Major Abner Harris, according to the identity they had created for him, had been born in 2520, in Cincinatti, Ohio. (Cincinatti’s a city, he thought. Ohio is a state. Remember that and don’t mix them up!) Ohio was one of the United States of America, which was a large political sub-unit of the planet Earth.

Major Abner Harris was now aged 42—with a good hundred years of his lifespan left. He had attended Western Reserve University, studying galactography; graduated ’43. Entered the Interstellar Redevelopment Corps ’46, commissioned ’50, now holding the rank of Major. Successful diplomatic-military missions to Altair VII, Sirius IX, Procyon II, Alpheratz IV, and Sirius VII.

Major Harris was unmarried. His parents had been killed in a highway jet-crash in ’44. He had no known living relatives with a greater consanguineity than D+. Height five feet ten, weight 220, color fair, retinal index point 033.

Major Harris was visiting Earth on vacation. He was to spend eight months relaxing on his native world before reassignment to his next planetary post.

Eight months, thought the alien being who called himself Major Abner Harris, would certainly be ample time for Major Abner Harris to lose himself in the swarming billions of Earth and carry out the purposes for which he had been sent.

The Lucky Lady was on the last lap of her journey across half a million light-years, bearing passengers to Earth and points along the route. Harris had boarded the starship on Alpheratz IV, after having been shipped there from Darruu via private warpship. For the past three weeks, while the giant vessel had slipped gently through the sleek gray tunnel in the continuum that was its overdrive channel, Major Harris had been practicing how to walk at Earth-norm gravity.

Darruu was a large world—its radius was 11,000 miles—and though its density was not as great as Earth’s, still the gravitational attraction was half again as intense. Harris had been born and raised under Darruu’s gravity of 1.5 Earth-norm. Or, as Harris had thought of it in the days when his mind centered not on Earth but on Darruu, Earth’s gravity was .67 Darruu-norm.

Either way, it meant that his muscles would be functioning in a gravitational field two-thirds as strong as the one they had developed in. For a while, at least, he would have a tendency to lift his feet too high, to overstep, to exaggerate every motion. If anyone noticed, he could use the excuse that he had spent most of his time in service on heavy planets, and that would explain away some of his awkwardness.

Some of it, but not all. A native-born Earther, no matter how many years he spends on heavy worlds, still never forgets how to cope with Earth-norm gravity. Harris had to learn that from scratch. He did learn it, painstakingly, during the three weeks of overdrive travel across the universe toward the system of Sol.

Now the journey was almost over. All that remained was the transfer from the starship to an Earth shuttle, and then he could begin his life as an Earthman.

Earth hung outside the main viewport twenty feet from Harris’ cabin. He stared at it. He saw a great green ball of a world, with two huge continents sprawling here, another land-mass there. A giant moon was moving in slow procession around the planet, keeping one pockmarked face eternally staring inward, the other glaring at outer space like a single beady dark eye.

The sight made Harris homesick.

Darruu was nothing like this. Darruu, viewed from space, had the appearance of a giant red fruit, covered over by the crimson mist that was the upper layer of its atmosphere. Beneath that, an observer could discern the great blue seas and the two hemisphere-large continents of Darraa and Darroo.

And the moons, Harris thought nostalgically. Seven glistening blank faces ranged like gleaming coins in the sky, each at its own angle to the ecliptic, each taking its place in the sky nightly like a gem moved by subtle clockwork. And the mating of the moons, when the seven came together once a year to form a fiercely radiant diadem that filled half the sky…

Angrily he cut the train of thought.

You’re an Earthman, remember? You can’t afford the luxury of nostalgia. Forget Darruu.

A voice on a speaker overhead said, “Please return to your cabins, ladies and gentlemen. In approximately eleven minutes we will come to a rest at the main spaceborne depot. Those passengers who are intending to transfer here will please notify their area steward.”

Harris returned to his cabin while the voice methodically repeated the statement in several of the other languages of Earth. Earth still spoke more than a dozen major tongues, which he was surprised to learn; Darruu had reached linguistic homogeneity some three thousand years or more in the past, and it was odd to think that so highly developed a planet as Earth still had many languages.

Minutes ticked by. The public address system hummed again, finally, and at last came the word that the Lucky Lady had ended its ion-drive cruise and was tethered to the orbital satellite. It was time for him to leave the ship.

Harris left his cabin for the last time and headed down-ramp to the designated room on D Deck where outgoing passengers were assembling. He recognized a few faces of people he had spoken to briefly on his trip, and he nodded to them, stiffly, with the dignity of a military man.

A clerk came up to him. “Is everything all right, sir? Are there any questions?”

“Where is the baggage?” Harris asked.

“Your baggage will be shipped across automatically. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“I wouldn’t want to lose it.”

“Everything’s tagged, sir. The scanners never miss. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Harris nodded. His baggage was important.

“Anything else, sir?”

“No. That will be all.”

More than three hundred of the Lucky Lady’s many passengers were leaving ship here. Harris found himself being herded along with the others through an irising airlock. Several dozen ungainly little ferries hovered just outside, linked to the huge starlines by swaying, precariously flimsy connecting tubes.

Harris entered one of the tubes, clinging to the guard rail as he crossed over, and found a seat on the ferry. The ferry filled rapidly, and with a blurt of ionic energy whisked itself across the emptiness of the void in a flight only a few minutes long. In another moment, Harris was once again crossing tubes, as the ferry unloaded its passengers into the main airlock of Orbiting Station Number One.

Bright lights greeted him. His remodeled eyes adjusted easily to the blaze. Another loudspeaker boomed, “Lucky Lady passengers who are continuing on to Earth report immediately to Routing Channel Four. Repeat: Lucky Lady passengers continuing on to Earth report immediately to Routing Channel Four. Passengers transshipping to other starlines should go to the nearest routing desk at once. Repeat: Passengers transshipping to other starlines…”

Harris began to feel like an article of merchandise. There was something damnedly impersonal about the way these Earthers kept shunting you from pillar to post. On Darruu, there was a good deal more ceremony involved.

But this, as he had to keep in mind, was not Darruu.

He followed a winking green light through a maze of passageways and found himself at a place that proclaimed itself, in an infinity of languages, to be Routing Channel Four. He joined the line.

It took half an hour for him to reach the front. A bland-faced Earther behind the desk smiled at him and said, “Your papers, please?”

Harris handed over the little fabrikoid portfolio. The spaceport official riffled sleepily through it and handed it back without a word, stamping a symbol on the margin of one page. A nod of the head sent Harris onward through the doorway.

As he boarded the Earth-Orbiter shuttle, an attractive stewardess gave him a warm smile. “Welcome aboard, Major. Has it been a good trip so far?”

“No complaints, thanks.”

“I’m glad. Here’s some information you might like to look over.”

He took the multigraphed sheet of paper from her and lowered himself into a seat. The sheet contained information of the sort a tourist was likely to want to know. Harris scanned it quickly.

“The Orbiting Station is located eighty thousand miles from Earth. It is locked in a perpetual twenty-four hour orbit that keeps it hovering approximately above Quito, Ecuador, South America. During a year the Orbiting Station serves an average of 8,500,000 travellers—”

Harris finished reading the sheet, crumpled it, and stuffed it into the disposal in his armrest. As a mental exercise he visualized South America and tried to locate Ecuador. When he had done that to his own satisfaction, he leaned back, and eyed his fellow passengers aboard the Earthbound shuttle. There were about fifty of them.

For all he knew, five were disguised Darruui like himself. He would have no sure way of telling. Or they might be enemies—Medlins—likewise in disguise. Or, he thought, possibly he was surrounded by agents of Earth’s own intelligence corps, who had already penetrated his disguise and who would sweep him efficiently and smoothly into custody the moment the shuttle touched down on the surface of Earth.

Trouble lay on every hand. Inwardly Major Harris felt calm, sure of his abilities, sure of his purpose, though there was the faint twinge of homesickness for Darruu that he knew he would never be entirely able to erase from his mind.

The shuttle banked into a steep deceleration curve. The artificial gravitation aboard the ship remained constant, of course.

Earth drew near. Landing came.

The shuttle hung poised over the skin of the landing field for thirty seconds, then dropped, touching down easily. A gantry crane shuffled out to support the ship, and buttress-legs sprang outward from the sides of the hull.

A steward’s voice said unctuously, “Passengers will please assemble at the airlock in single file.”

The passengers duly assembled, and duly marched out through the airlock, out into the atmosphere of Earth. A green omnibus waited outside on the field to take them to the arrivals building. The fifty passengers obediently filed into the omnibus.

Harris found a seat by the window and stared out across the broad field. A yellow sun was in the blue sky. The air was cold and thin; he shivered involuntarily, and drew his cloak around him for warmth.

“Cold?”

The man who had asked the question shared Harris’ seat with him—a fat, deeply tanned, prosperous man with thick lips and a look of deep concern on his face.

“A bit,” Harris said.

“That’s odd. Nice balmy spring day like this, you’d think everybody would be enjoying the weather. You pick up malaria in the Service, or something?”

Harris grinned and shook his head. “No, nothing like that. But I’ve been on some pretty hot worlds the last ten years. Anything under ninety degrees or so and I start shivering. Force of habit.”

The other chuckled and said, “Must be near eighty in the shade today.”

“I’ll be accustomed to Earth weather again before long,” Harris said easily. “You know how it is. Once an Earthman, always an Earthman.”

“Yeah. What planets you been to?”

“Classified,” Harris said.

“Oh. Oh, yeah. I suppose you have to.”

His seatmate abruptly lost interest in him. Harris made a mental note to carry out a trifling adjustment on his body thermostat, first decent chance he got. His skin was lined with subminiaturized heating and refrigerating units—just one of the many useful modifications the surgeons had given him.

Darruu’s mean temperature was 120 degrees, on the scale used by the Earthers in his allegedly native land. (What kind of civilization could it be, Harris wondered, that had three or four different scales for measuring temperature?) When the temperature on Darruu dropped to 80, Darruui cursed the cold and bundled into winter clothes. The temperature was 80 now, and he was uncomfortably cold, in sharp and revealing contrast to everyone about him. He told himself that he would simply have to go on freezing for most of the day, at least, until in a moment of privacy he could make the necessary adjustments. Around him, the Earthers seemed to be perspiring and feeling discomfort because of the heat.

The bus filled finally, and spurted across the field for a ten-minute trip to a high-domed building of gleaming metal and green plastic. The driver called out, “First stop is customs. Have your papers ready.”

Inside, Harris found his baggage already waiting for him at a counter labelled HAM-HAT. There were two suitcases, both of them equipped with topological secret compartments that no one was likely to detect.

He surrendered his passport. The customs man glanced at it, then riffled it in front of an optical scanner that made an instant copy of its contents.

“Open the suitcases.”

Harris pressed his thumb to the opener-plate. The suitcases sprang open. The customs man poked through them perfunctorily, nodded, pushed a button that activated an electronic spybeam, and waited for a telltale buzz. Nothing buzzed.

“Anything to declare?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay. You’re clear. Close ’em up.”

Harris locked the suitcases again, and the customs official briefly touched a tracer-stamp to them. It left no visible imprint, but the photonic scanners at every door would be watching for the radiations, and no one with an unstamped item of luggage could get through the electronic barriers.

“Where do I go now?” Harris asked.

“Your next stop’s Immigration, Major.”

At Immigration they studied his passport briefly, noted that he was a government employee, and passed him along to Health. Here he felt a moment of alarm; about one out of every fifty incoming passengers from a starship was detained at random, to be given a comprehensive medical exam by way of plague-watch. If the finger fell upon him, he knew, the game was up right here and now. Ten seconds in front of a fluoroscope would tell them that nobody with that kind of skeletal structure had ever been born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The finger fell elsewhere. He got through Health with nothing more than a rudimentary checkup. At the last desk his passport was stamped with a re-entry visa, and the clerk said, “You haven’t been on Earth for a long time, have you, Major?”

“Not in ten years. Hope things haven’t changed too much.”

“The women are still the same, anyway,” the clerk said with what was meant to be a sly leer. He shuffled Harris’ papers together, stuck them back in the portfolio, and handed them to him. “Everything’s in order, Major. Go straight ahead and out the door to your left. And lots of luck on Earth.”

Harris thanked him and moved along, gripping one suitcase in each hand. A month ago, at the beginning of his journey, the suitcases had seemed heavy to him. But that had been back on Darruu; here on Earth they weighed only two-thirds as much. He carried them jauntily.

Soon it will be spring on Darruu, he thought. The red-leaved jasaar trees would blossom and their sweet perfume would fill the air.

With an angry inner scowl he blanked out the thought. Such needless self-torment was stupid. He was no Darruui. He was Major Abner Harris, late of Cincinnati, here on Earth for eight months of vacation.

He knew his orders. He was to establish residence, avoid detection, and in the second week of his stay make contact with the chief Darruui agent on Earth. Further instructions would come from him.