The Silent Invaders

EIGHT

The first waves of inaudible below-the-threshold sound rippled out from the focus on his thigh, ignoring false flesh and striking through to the Medlin core beneath. Protected by the three-foot cone of his shield, Harris nevertheless felt sick to the stomach, rocked by the reverberating sound waves that poured from the pellet embedded in his thigh. Stabbing spasms of nausea shivered through him a dozen times a second.

But he was getting off lightly, compared with the others in the room.

Coburn, his face mottled by shock and anger, was reaching for his weapon, but he never got to it. Nerves refused to carry the messages of the angry brain. His arm drooped slackly. He slumped over, falling heavily to the floor.

Beth fell even more rapidly, dropping within an instant of the first waves.

The other two Medlins fell.

Still the subsonic waves poured forth, as Harris held his hand tightly to the nexus on his hip. To his surprise, Harris saw that the two giants were still remaining on their feet and were semi-conscious, if groggy. They were moving around in vague circles, shuffling and shambling, fighting the subsonic.

It must be because they’re so big, he thought. It takes longer for the subsonic to knock them out. I’ll just have to keep juicing them for a while.

Wrynn was sagging now, swaying from side to side like some wounded behemoth. His wife, reeling under the impact of the noiseless waves, slipped to the floor. A moment later her husband followed her, landing with an enormous booming thud as three hundred pounds of bone and muscle crashed to the floor.

The office was silent. Little puddles of darkness stained the carpet where the falling Medlins had spilled their drink. Six unconscious forms lay sprawled awkwardly on the floor.

Harris pressed his side again, signalling the all clear to the five Darruui waiting in the street a block away.

He found the switch that opened the door and pulled it down. That uncanny mechanism whisked the door out of sight, and Harris peered outward into the hall. Three more Medlins lay outside, unconscious. A fourth was running toward them from the far end of the long hall. He was shouting, “What happened? What’s going on? You people sick or something?”

Harris stared at him and pressed his hip a second time. The Medlin ran into the forty-foot zone and recoiled visibly, but without any awareness of what was happening to him. He staggered forward a few steps and fell, joining his comrades on the thick velvet carpet. Harris let the signal subside.

Ten of them, he thought.

Ten Medlins. Plus two more if the two giant Wrynns turned out not to be Earthers. A decent haul, he thought. A tenth of the Medlin task force blotted out in one simple operation.

He drew the disruptor.

It lay in his palm, small, deadly. The trigger was nothing more than a thin strand of metal. He needed only to flip off the guard, press the trigger back, aim casually in any direction, and watch the Medlins die of broiled brains and jellied synapses.

But his hand was shaking.

He did not fire.

He bit down hard on his lip and gritted his teeth and lifted the weapon, and tried to force himself to use it. But he could not. He raged at himself, scowled and harangued himself. This was no way for a Servant of the Spirit to behave! Those were Medlins down on the floor, beasts in human guise.

Kill them! Kill! Kill!

And he held the disruptor loosely, doing nothing. Sweating, he reached his left hand over, wrenched the guard off the disruptor. His finger curled into place over the trigger. He brought the gun up, pointed it at Beth, aimed it between her breasts. He closed his eyes and tried to strip away the deluding synthetic flesh, tried to carve the Medlin reality out of her, to reveal her as the hideous, pebble-skinned, bony monstrosity that he knew her to be beneath her Earther form. A muscle trembled in his cheek as he fought to pull the trigger and destroy her.

Then a silent voice within his skull whispered, You could not be trusted after all, could you? You were a traitor through and through, a cheat and a liar. But we had to let the test go on at least to this point, for the sake of our consciences.

“Who said that?” Harris gasped, looking wildly around in every corner of the room.

I did.

It felt like feathers brushing his brain. “Where are you?” he demanded, panicky. “I don’t see you. Where are you hiding?”

I am in this room, came the calm reply, and Harris wanted to tear his skull apart to find the source of that quiet voice.

Put down the gun, Harris-Khülom.

Harris hesitated. His hand moved an inch or two toward his bodily distress-signal. But even that gesture was intercepted, intercepted and understood.

No, don’t try to signal your friends. Just let the gun fall.

As though it had been wrenched from his hand, the gun dropped from his fingers. It bounced a few inches on the carpet and lay still.

Now shut off the subsonic, came the quiet command. I find it unpleasant.

Obediently Harris deactivated the instrument. His mind was held in some strange stasis; he had no private volitional control whatever. His body throbbed with frustration. How were they doing this to him? They had made him a prisoner in his own mind.

His lips fumbled to shape words.

“Who are you? Tell me who you are!”

A member of that super-race whose existence you find it so difficult to accept.

Bewildered, Harris looked down at Wrynn and his wife. Both the fallen giants were unconscious, motionless, breathing slowly, regularly.

“Wrynn?” he asked hoarsely. “How can your mind function if you’re unconscious?”

I am not Wrynn, came the reply.

“Not… Wrynn?”

No. Not Wrynn.

“Who are you, then? Where are you? Stop driving me crazy! I’ve got to know!”

I am not Wrynn, came the calm voice, but Wrynn’s unborn child.

Gently Harris felt himself falling toward the floor. It was exactly as though an intangible, invisible hand had yanked his legs out from under him, then had caught him and eased his fall.

He lay quiescent, eyes open, neither moving nor wanting to move. He lacked even the power to sound his distress-signal. In some strange way the desire to call for help had been taken from him. Only in the depths of his mind did he boil with fear and frustration.

As the minutes passed, the victims of the subsonic slowly returned to consciousness.

Beth woke first. She sat up, stirred, put her hands to her eyes. She turned to the unconscious form of Wrynn’s wife, and now Harris saw the gentle rounding of the giantess’ belly.

Beth said to the unconscious giantess, “You went to quite an extreme to prove a point!”

You were in no danger, came the answer.

The others were awakening now, one by one, sitting up, rubbing their foreheads. Harris, motionless, watched them. His head throbbed too, as though he had been stunned by the subsonic device himself.

“Suppose you had been knocked out by the subsonic too?” Beth asked, still addressing herself to the life within the giant woman. “He would have killed us. That’s what he came here for.”

The subsonic could not affect me. I am beyond the reach of its powers.

Harris found his voice again. “That… that embryo can think and act?” His voice was a harsh, ragged whisper.

Beth nodded. “The next generation. It reaches sentience while still in the womb. By the time it’s born it’s fully aware, and able to defend itself while its body catches up with the abilities of its mind.”

“And I thought it was a hoax,” Harris said dizzily. “All this talk of a super-race. Some kind of propaganda stunt.”

He felt dazed. The values of his life had been shattered in a single moment, and it would not be easy to repair them with similar speed.

“No,” Beth said. “It was no hoax. No propaganda myth. And we knew you’d try to trick us when we let you go. At least, Wrynn said you would. I was naive enough to doubt him.”

“Wrynn is telepathic too?”

“Yes, but only to a limited extent. He can only receive impressions. He can’t transmit telepathically to others, the way his son can.”

Harris frowned and said, “If you knew what I was going to do, why did you release me?”

Beth said, “Call it a test. I hoped you might change your beliefs if we let you go. I had a kind of blind faith in you. But you didn’t change.”

“No,” Harris said. His voice was flat and lifeless. “I came here to kill you.”

“We knew that the moment you stepped through the door. Wrynn detected your purpose, and his son transmitted it to us. But the seed of rebellion was in you. We hoped you might still be swayed. You failed us. You could not break away from your Darruui self.”

Harris bowed his head. The signal in his body rasped again, but he ignored it.

Let Carver sweat out there, he thought. This thing is bigger than anything Carver ever dreamed of. He can’t begin to understand.

“Tell me something,” Harris said haltingly. “Don’t you know what will happen to Medlin—and Darruu as well—once there are enough of these beings, once they begin to throw their weight around?”

“Nothing will happen,” Beth said calmly. “None of the dire things you imagine. Do you think that they’re a race of petty power-seekers, intent on establishing a galactic dominion?” The girl laughed derisively. “That sort of thinking belongs to the obsolete non-telepathic species. Us. The lower animals of the universe. These new people have different goals.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“They have let us see their minds,” Beth said. “We have no doubt. Power does not interest them. They have no inadequacies that they must compensate for by holding sway over others. They mean to challenge the universe itself—not the peoples of it.”

“And we’re obsolete, you say?”

“Completely.”

“But these mutants wouldn’t have survived if you Medlins hadn’t aided them!” Harris protested. “If we’re all obsolete, who’s responsible? You are! You’ve helped your own race commit suicide—and killed Darruu in the process!”

Beth smiled oddly. “At least we were capable of seeing the new race without envy. We helped them as much as we could, because we bowed to the inevitable. We knew they would prevail anyway, given time. Their genes were too strong to be dispersed and destroyed. If we hadn’t helped, it might have taken another century, perhaps, or another millenium. We preferred that they look kindly on us when they matured. Our day is done, Harris, and so is the day of Darruu, and the day of the non-telepathic Earthmans as well.”

“And ours too,” Wrynn said mildly. “We are the intermediates, the transitionals—the links between the old species and the new one that is emerging. I told you: my son will be as far beyond me as I am beyond my parents. You have already seen the proof of that.”

Harris nodded grimly. He felt the tension within him relax, but he did not reach for his alarm signal, for he knew that the unborn mutant could stop him with ease, moving a thousand or a million times faster than his clumsy limbs, and anticipating his decisions.

He stared at his hands—the hands of an Earthman, with Darruui flesh under the pink lining.

He thought: all our striving is for nothing. Everything we have built is hollow.

A new race, a glorious race, nurtured by the Medlins, brought into being on Earth. The galaxy waited for them. All of space and time lay open to them, eager for their tread. They were demigods.

He had regarded the Earthers as primitives, creatures with a mere few thousand years of history behind them, mere pale humanoids of no consequence in the galactic scheme of things.

But he had been wrong.

Long after Darruu had become a hollow world of past glories, the sons of these giant Earthers would roam the galaxies.

Looking up, he said in a choked voice, “I guess we made a tremendous mistake, we of Darruu. I was sent here to help sway the Earthers to the side of Darruu. But it’s the other way around, really, isn’t it? It’s Darruu that will have to swear loyalty to Earth, some day soon.”

“Not soon,” Wrynn said. “The true race is not yet out of childhood. Twenty years more must pass before the first generation is mature. And we have enemies on Earth.”

“The old Earthmen,” Coburn said. “How do you think they’ll like being replaced? Do you think they’ll stand by with folded hands when they realize what’s sprouting in their midst? They’ll try to root the mutants out. They won’t just nobly wave them on to inherit the future. And that’s why we’re here. To help the mutants until they can stand fully alone. You Darruui are just nuisances getting in the way, bringing old rivalries to a planet that isn’t interested in them.”

That would have been cause for hot anger, once. But now Harris merely shrugged. His whole mission had been without purpose, he saw now.

But yet, a lingering doubt remained, a last suspicion. These were Medlins. Since when were Medlins so noble, so eager to abase themselves before a new race?

The silent voice of the unborn superman said, audible to everyone in the room including Harris, He still is not convinced, despite everything.

“Is this so?” Beth asked.

Harris nodded. “I’m afraid the child is right,” he murmured. “I see, and I hear that voice, and I believe—and yet all my conditioning tells me that it’s impossible, that this could be happening. Medlins are hateful creatures; I know that, intuitively. And all laws of self-preservation as a race cry out against aiding mutants the way you claim to be doing.”

Beth said, “Would you like a guarantee of our good faith?”

“What do you mean?”

There is a way to show you the truth in such a way that you can have no further doubts.”

“How?” Harris asked.

To the womb-bound godling Beth said, “Link us.”