The Silent Invaders

THREE

He stopped in the hotel lobby and poked his nose into the concierge’s booth. The concierge, a bony-faced, hawk-nosed man whose veiled eyes glittered with the knowledge accumulated in a hundred years of hoteliering, smiled subserviently at him.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to know how to get to 11543 Narvon Boulevard, the quickest way.”

A grin creased the leathery face. “The Major is interested in the night-life, is he? Have you made a reservation? The Naron Boulevard clubs usually have few empty seats.”

“I’m meeting a friend there,” Harris said. “I assume he’s taken care of the arrangements. Is it possible to walk there?”

“To walk? Oh, no, no, not advisable at all. It is a very long walk. And not at all safe. I will get a helitaxi for you. It is a very quick trip by helitaxi.”

Harris nodded and slipped a bill into the cubicle. The concierge picked up a phone and spoke briefly into it. “The helitaxi will be here in a moment, Major. If you will be so kind as to wait by the north entrance of the hotel…”

Harris stepped outside. Another uniformed flunkey pointed to the helitaxi ramp curving upward at the right. Harris mounted it, and moments later a gleaming helitaxi settled down, its generators purring, and a door irised open in its flank.

Harris got in.

“Narvon Boulevard, Major?” the cabbie said.

“That’s right.”

Harris leaned back against the plush upholstery. The sound of sinuous music filtered down from the small speaker in the cab’s roof. There was the sudden throb of powerful rotors, and then they were aloft, rising vertically to the thousand-foot level.

The ride was a short one, eastward out of the heart of the city. They passed from the region of bright lights to one of dimness, and then to another area of brightness, this time gaudy and flamboyant rather than merely warm and brilliant.

The helitaxi spiralled downward onto a public landing ramp.

“Three units fifty ” the cabbie said.

Harris peeled off four units and got out. The cab whirred off into the mild night, leaving him alone.

The other operative had named a specific street-corner as their rendezvous point. Harris walked up to the corner, where a coolfire streetsign glowed a lambent green against the side of a building, and discovered that he was on the 105 block of Narvon Boulevard. He had to go to the 115 block. Somebody had given the cabbie the wrong instructions, he thought in annoyance. Walking ten blocks in the dark didn’t overly much appeal to him.

He started to walk. It was a nightclub district, all bright lights and brassy music. From time to time he spied stealthy figures moving off down dark alleyways between the clubs, but he kept moving, secure in the knowledge that he was armed and could handle himself in all but the most unexpected of attacks.

The blocks peeled away. 106 block, 109, 113. Each was like its predecessor—an unending strip of amusement palaces and honky-tonks. Judging from the radiant signs outside, each had its own specialty—nude dancing girls in one, gambling in the next, exotic liqueurs in the next, darker things perhaps in some.

He reached the 115 block.

A figure leaned casually against the lamppost on the southeast corner of the street. Quickly Harris crossed to him. In the brightness of the streetlamp he was able to make out the other’s face: lean, lantern-jawed, solemn, with a grave dignity to it.

Harris walked up. The other man regarded him with blank lack of interest.

Harris said softly, “Pardon me, friend. Do you know where I might be able to purchase a mask for the carnival, by any chance?”

It was the agreed-upon recognition-query. The other answered, in a deep, harsh voice, “Masks are expensive. You would be wiser to stay home.”

He thrust out his hand.

Harris took it, gripping the wrist in the Darruui manner, and rejoicing in the contact, in the firm grasp of the other man. Eleven hundred light-years from home and he beheld a fellow Servant of the Spirit! His depressing load of lonely homesickness dropped away.

“I’m Major Abner Harris,” he said.

The other nodded. “Good to meet you. I’m John Carver. There’s a table waiting for us inside.”

“Inside” turned out to be a place that called itself the Nine Planets Club, across the street. The atmosphere inside was steamy and smoke-clouded; bubbles of coolfire drifted round the ceiling, half a dozen colors of it that gave a rainbow effect to the greasy clouds of smoke. A row of long-limbed nudes pranced gaily to the accompaniment of the raucously discordant noise that passed for music on Terra. The surgeons, Harris thought, had never managed to instill a liking for Terran music in him, whatever other wonders they had succeeded in performing.

A bar-girl came over. She was a Rigelian megamastid, exceptionally well endowed, practically exploding out of her scanty yellow tunic. She flashed a synthetically voluptuous smile whose cynicism turned Harris’ stomach and said, “What’ll it be to drink, boys?”

Carver answered, “A Nine Planets Sling.”

“And you?”

Harris hesitated. “Make it the same,” he replied after a moment.

The girl stalked away, her bosoms swaying. Harris said, “What have I just ordered?”

“It’s all the rage this year. You’ll see.”

The Nine Planets Sling turned out to be something cloudy and cool in a tall glass brimming with ice. Harris tasted it, and found it musky but not unpleasant. It seemed to be a mixture of half a dozen different liquors and some sort of fruit juice. He sipped it slowly.

Carver said in a low voice, “Have you had any trouble since you arrived?”

“No. Should I have been expecting any?”

The lean man shrugged inconclusively. “Trouble is brewing. It may come any day.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“There are one hundred Medlin agents on Earth right now,” Carver said. “Yesterday we stumbled onto an important cache of secret Medlin documents. Now we have the name of the hundred and their photographs. We also know that they plan to wipe us out in the very near future.”

Harris bit into a lump of ice and chewed it reflectively. “How many Darruui are on Earth right now?” he asked.

“You are the tenth to arrive.”

Harris’ eyes widened. He hadn’t thought the situation was as bad as all that. One hundred Medlins here already, against only ten Darrui!

“Stiff odds,” he said.

Carver nodded. “Agreed. But we know their identitities, while they are ignorant of ours. We can strike first. We must strike first. Unless we eliminate them, we will not be able to proceed with our work here.”

The music reached an ear-splitting crescendo. Moodily, Harris stared at the nude chorus-line as it gyrated. Strangely, he felt some glandular disturbance at the sight of the girls, and frowned. Was his Earthman’s outward form betraying him? There was no reason for him to be aroused by those cavorting girls. By any Darruui standards, the girls were obscenely ugly.

But this was not Darruu.

He tightened his grip on his nearly empty glass and said, “How do we go about eliminating these hundred Medlins?”

“You have weapons. I’ll supply you with the necessary information. You know the odds. If you can manage to get ten of them before they get you—and if each of the rest of us can do the same—we’ll be all right.” Carver drew a billfold forth from his tunic and extracted a snapshot from it with lean, edgily nervous fingers. “Here’s your first one, now. Kill her and report back to me. The job should be easy because she’s staying at the Spaceways Hotel, the same as you.”

Harris felt a jolt. “A Medlin at my hotel?”

“Why not? They’re everywhere. Here. Take a look at the picture.”

Harris accepted the photo from the other Darruui and scanned it. It was a glossy tridim in natural color. It showed a blonde girl wearing a low-cut black sheath. The shot seemed to have been taken by a hidden camera at some sort of party. The girl was laughing and waving a cocktail glass in the air, and other figures could be seen behind her in the picture.

Controlling his voice, Harris said, “This girl’s much too pretty to be a Medlin agent.”

“That’s why she’s so deadly,” Carver said. “Kill her first. She goes under the name of Beth Baldwin.”

Harris stared at the photo a long while. A pulse pounded in his forehead, and a strange swirl of emotions rushed through his brain. This girl? A spy? He thought back over the day, the pleasant time he had had with her, the feeling of warmth, of friendship. Kill her first, Carver had said.

“Something the matter, Major?”

“No. Not at all.”

“You look very… preoccupied.”

“It’s just a reaction from my travelling,” Harris said. He handed the incriminating photo back to Carver and nodded his head. “Okay. The assignment has been received. I’ll get in touch with you again when the job’s done.”

“Good. Another drink?”

Harris was uncertain. The first one had left him a bit giddy, and vaguely ill at ease in the pit of his stomach. His Daruui metabolism was not really comfortable handling these alien hydrocarbons.

But he nodded abruptly. “Yes. Yes, I think I’ll have another.”

It was nearly two in the morning when Harris returned to his hotel. He had spent something over an hour with the man who called himself John Carver. Harris felt tired, confused, wan. He found himself faced with decisions that frightened him, here at the very outset of his tour of duty on Earth.

Beth Baldwin a Medlin spy?

How improbable that seemed! But yet Carver had had her photo. Could there have been some mistake? No. Carver would not make a mistake on a matter like that. Beth had been definitely identified as a spy, or else Carver would not have given the assassination order.

And it was Harris’ job to kill her, now—a task he had no option of refusing. He was a Servant of the Spirit. He could not betray his trust.

But before he committed himself to any irrevocable course of action, he told himself, he would do a little checking in advance. Carver might not be infallible. He did not want the blood of an innocent to live as a blemish on his soul.

He took the gravshaft to the 58th floor, but instead of going to his own room, he turned left and headed down the corridor toward the room whose number Beth Baldwin had given him—5820.

He paused a moment outside her door, then nudged the door-signal.

There was no immediate response. He frowned and nudged it again. This time he heard the sound of a door-scanner humming just above him, telling him that she was awake and just within the door.

He said, “It’s me. Abner. I have to see you, Beth.”

“It’s late. It’s the middle of the night.”

“I’m sorry if I woke you. It’s important that I talk to you.”

“Hold on,” came the sleepy reply from inside. “Let me get something on, Abner.”

He waited. A moment passed, and then the door slid silently open. Beth smiled at him warmly. She had “put something on,” all right, but the “something” had not been very much. She had donned a flimsy gown that concealed her body as if she were wearing so much gauze.

But Harris was not interested in the contours of her body now, attractive though that body happened to be. He was staring at the tiny glittering weapon that she held firmly in her hand, trained on his skull.

Harris recognized the weapon.

It was the Medlin version of the disruptor-pistol.

He had the confirmation he had come to get. But he had not expected to gain it this way.

“Come on in, Abner,” she said in a cooly calm voice, gesturing with the disruptor.

Numbly he stepped forward, too stunned to speak. The door shut behind him. Beth pointed toward a chair with the disrupter’s snout.

“Sit down over there.”

He ran his tongue over dry lips. “How come the gun, Beth?”

“You know that answer without my having to tell it to you,” she said. “Will you sit down?”

He sat.

She nodded. “Now that you’ve been to see Carver, you know exactly who I am.”

“He said you were a Medlin agent. I was skeptical, but…” He glanced at the gun.

It was hard to believe, but the proof was staring menacingly at him. He looked at the lovely girl who stood only ten feet away from him, holding a disruptor trained at his brain. Judging from her appearance, the Medlin surgeons were as skillful as those of Darruu, it seemed, perhaps even more skilled, for the wiry pebble-skinned Medlins were even less humanoid than the Darrui—and yet he would have taken an oath on his birth-tree that those breasts, those flaring hips, those long well-formed legs, were genuine and not the product of the surgeon’s arts. Certainly they looked as genuine as was conceivable.

Disconcertingly genuine.

The Medlin who called herself Beth Baldwin said, “We had complete information on you from the moment you entered the orbit of Earth, Abner—or should I rather say, Aar Khülom?”

He started in surprise. The jolt of hearing his own name spoken on Earth was like getting a bucket of icewater in the face.

“How did you know that name?” he demanded.

She laughed lightly. “I knew it the same way I knew you were from Darruu, the same way I knew the exact moment you were going to come out of your room before, when we collided.”

“So that was arranged?”

“Of course.”

“And you also knew in advance that I was coming here to kill you just now?”

She nodded.

Harris frowned and considered the situation. “Medlins aren’t telepathic,” he said doggedly. “There isn’t a single telepathic race in the galaxy.”

“None that you know about, anyway,” she said, a mocking light dancing in her eyes.

He tensed. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. Let it pass.”

He shrugged the idea away. Apparently the Medlin spy system was formidably well organized, perhaps utilizing a traitor or two on Darruu itself. All this nonsense about telepathy was a false lure she was setting up merely to cloud the trail. But the one fact about which there was no doubt whatever was…

“I came here to kill you,” Harris said. “I bungled it. You trapped me. I guess you’re going to kill me now, eh, Beth?”

“Wrong. I just want to talk,” she said.

He eyed her thoughtfully, and began to relax just a little. He said in a flat voice, angry with her now for this cat-and-mouse treatment, “If you want to talk, have the good grace to put some clothing on, will you? Having you standing around wearing next to nothing disturbs my powers of conversation.”

“Oh?” she said, laughing in a silvery, brittle way. “You mean this artificial body of mine stirs some response in that artificial body of yours? How quaint! How very interesting!” Without turning her back on him or lowering the disruptor, she drew a robe from the closet and slipped it on over the filmy gown. “There,” she purred. “Is that easier on your glandular balance?”

“Somewhat.”

“I wouldn’t want you to be in any discomfort on my account,” she said.

The Darruui began to fidget. She was toying with him, making a mock of him. The more he recalled of their earlier conversation, of his mawkish, almost maudlin talk of loneliness and homesickness, the more he detested her for having fooled him this way—though he had to admit his motives had not been of the purest either.

He was deeply troubled, now. There was no way he could possibly activate his emergency signal without moving his hands, and any sudden hand-motion was likely to be fatal so long as Beth kept that disruptor angled down on him. He sat reluctantly motionless while rivers of sweat streamed down the skin they had grafted to his own.

“So you have me,” he said. “What do you want with me? Why don’t you kill me and get it over with?”

“You must think I’m terribly cruel.”

“You’re a Medlin.”

“I admit that much. Are the words ‘Medlin’ and ‘cruel’ synonymous in your vocabulary, Abner?”

“Our worlds have been enemies for centuries. Am I supposed to admire the nobility of the Medlins? Their lofty intelligence? Their physical beauty? Your world is a world of jackals and murderers!” he spat out.

“How kind of you, Abner.”

“Pull the trigger and get it over with!” he raged. “I won’t be taunted this way.”

She shrugged. “I still prefer to talk.”

“Talk, then,” he muttered.

Beth said, “Very well. I’ll tell you what I know about you. You’re one of ten Darruui on Earth. Other agents are on their way from Darruu now, but at the moment there are only ten of you here. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“Why should I?” Harris said tightly.

She nodded. “A good point. You’re under no obligation to betray your people. But I assure you that we have all the information about you that we need, so you needn’t try to make up tales for the sake of patriotism. Don’t strain your imagination. To continue: you and your outfit are here on Earth for the purpose of subverting Terran allegiance and winning Earth over to the side of Darruu.”

“I won’t deny that,” Harris said. “But you Medlins are here for much the same kind of reason—to get control of Earth.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” the girl said sharply. “We’re here to help the Terrans, not to dominate them.”

“Oh, of course.”

“You can’t understand motives like that, can you?” she asked, a cutting edge of scorn on her voice.

“I can understand altruistic motives well enough,” he said easily. “I just have trouble believing in altruism when it’s preached by a Medlin.”

She scowled. “I suppose you’ll think it’s more propaganda when I tell you that we Medlins don’t believe in violence if peaceful means will accomplish our goals.”

“Those are very nice words,” Harris said. “They’d look good inscribed on a monument of galactic harmony. But how can you help the Terrans?”

“It’s a matter of genetics.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t expect you to. But this isn’t the time or the place to explain in detail.”

He let that point pass. In a bitter voice he said, “So you deliberately threw yourself in contact with me earlier, let me take you out to dinner, walked around arm-in-arm, and all this time you knew I was actually a Darruui in disguise?”

“Of course I knew.”

“Wasn’t it cynical of you to talk and act the way you did?”

“And what about you?” she shot back at him. “Taking advantage of an innocent Earth girl? Feeding her a lot of lies about yourself?”

“It’s different,” he said lamely.

“Is it?” She laughed. “I also knew that when you were pretending to get sick earlier this evening, it was really because you had to contact your chief operative. And I knew that when you told me you were going to visit a friend, you were actually attending an emergency rendezvous. I also knew what your friend Carver was going to tell you to do—which is why I had my gun ready when you came ringing at my door.”

He stared at her. “Suppose I hadn’t gotten that emergency message, though. Suppose I had no idea of what you really were. We were going to come here to your room and drink and probably make love. Would you… would you have gone to bed with me, even knowing what you knew?”

She was silent a moment.

Then she said, without emotion, “Most likely. It would have been most interesting to see what sort of biological reactions the Darruui surgeons are capable of building.”

A flash of savage, blind hatred rippled through Harris-Khülom. The bitch ! he thought. He had been raised to hate Medlins anyway; they were the ancient ancestral enemies of his people, galactic rivals of the Darruui for four thousand years, perhaps more. The mere sight of a Medlin was enough to stir rage in a Darruui. Only the fact that this one was clad in the flesh of a handsome Earthgirl had kept Harris from feeling his normal revulsion for all things Medlin.

But now it surged forth at this revelation of her calm and callous biological “curiosity.” It was almost blasphemous for someone so lovely to speak so hideously.

He wondered how far her callousness extended. If he made a move, would she gun him down?

And how good was her aim?

Probably too good, especially at point-blank range. He mastered his anger and said, “That’s a pretty cold-blooded way of thinking, Beth.”

“Maybe. I’m sorry if my frankness offends you.”

“I’ll bet you are.”

She smiled at him and said in a gentler voice, “Let’s forget about that, shall we? There are a few things I want to tell you.”

“Such as?”

“For one: did you know that you’re fundamentally disloyal to the Darruui cause?”

Harris laughed harshly, thinking with fierce nostalgia of his homeland.

“You’re crazy!”

“Afraid not. Listen to me, Abner, and see if I’m not telling the truth. You’re desperately homesick for Darruu, aren’t you?”

“Admitted.”

“You never wanted to come here in the first place, but the assignment was given to you, and you took it. You happened to have been born into a caste that has certain obligations of public service imposed on it, and you’re fulfilling those obligations. But you don’t really know very much about what it is you’re doing here on Earth, and for half a plugged unit you’d give the whole thing up and go back to Darruu on the next ship out.”

“Very clever,” he said stonily, inwardly realizing the truth of her words, though refusing to let her see that. “Now give me my horoscope for the next six months,” he said in a tone of heavy sarcasm.

“That’s easy enough. First, you’ll come to our headquarters and learn what my people hope to accomplish on Earth…”

“I know that one already.”

“You think you do,” she said smoothly. “But all you really know is what your own propaganda ministers have told you. Don’t interrupt. You’ll learn the real reason why we’re on Earth. Once you’ve come to see what that is, you’ll join us and help to protect Earth against the menace represented by Darruu.”

He laughed. “I’ll turn against my own world?”

“You will.”

“And why, precisely, are you so sure that I’ll do all these incredible things?”

“Because it’s in your personality makeup to do them,” she said. “You can’t help doing them, once the right motivation is supplied. Besides, you’re falling in love.”

“With you?” Harris snapped. “Don’t flatter yourself, girl.”

“I’m speaking objectively. I know your own mind better than you do.”

“And you can stand there and tell me that I’m falling in love with a lot of fake female flesh plastered over a scrawny and repulsive Medlin body? Hah!”

She remained calm, still wearing that serene smile, and not replying.

Harris measured the distance between them, wondering whether she would use the weapon after all if he jumped at her. A disrupter broiled the neural tissue; if she got him in the brain or in any key part of the body, death would be instantaneous and fairly ghastly. Even a swiping shot across a limb would leave him crippled.

He decided to risk it.

He was a Servant of the Spirit, he reminded himself. He was here under certain obligations, as even the Medlin wench seemed to know. His assignment was to kill Medlins, not to let himself be killed by them. He had nothing to lose by making the attempt—and nothing but a scar on his soul to gain if he let her frighten him with that shiny little disruptor.

In a soft voice he said, “You didn’t answer me, Beth—or whatever your name really is. Do you actually think I’d fall in love with something like you?”

“Why not?”

“Do Darruui and Medlins ever feel anything but hate for one another? Medlins are physically disgusting to all Darruui. You know that.”

“Biologically we’re Earthers now, not Medlins or Darruui. It’s possible that there could be an attraction between us.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. “After all, I did ask you to cover your body so it wouldn’t distract me. And I reacted the same way to dancing girls in the night club with Carver.” He smiled and said, “I’m all confused. I need some time to think things over.”

“Of course. You…”

He sprang from the chair and covered the ten feet that separated them in two big bounds, expecting at any moment to feel the searing blast of the disruptor frying his nervous system. He stretched out one hand desperately to grab the wrist of the arm that held the disruptor.

He succeeded in deflecting the weapon toward the ceiling. She did not even attempt to fire. He closed on her wrist, tightening until he could feel the delicate bones grinding against one another.

“Drop it!” he grated.

The tiny pistol dropped to the tiled floor. With a deft flick of his toe, Harris kicked the disruptor out of sight un-der the bed. Pressed against her, he stared into eyes blazing with anger.

The anger melted suddenly into passion as their bodies pressed tight. Automatically he tensed as he saw the warm, beckoning look in her eyes. Then a surge of cautious fear went through him.

She’s trying to trap me with her body, he thought. Taking advantage of these damned confused Earther sexdrives they built into me.

He stepped back, not willing to have such close contact with her, afraid to let himself be lured.

He reached for his own gun. She was too dangerous to be allowed to live, he thought. Beautiful as she was, it was safer, wiser, to kill her right now, while he had the chance to do it. She’s just a Medlin, he argued. A deadly one.

He started to draw the weapon from his tunic. Suddenly she lifted her hand, moved it in a quick arc upward. There was the twinkling of something bright glittering between her fingers.

She laughed.

Then Harris recoiled, helpless, as the bolt of a stunner struck him in the face like a club against the back of his skull. She had moved fast, much too fast for him. He had hardly even seen the motion as she pulled the concealed weapon from its hiding place.

She fired again.

He struggled to get his gun out, but his muscles would not obey.

He toppled forward, paralyzed.