The Second IF Reader of Science Fiction

by Anthology

  “I see,” he said at least. “Well, that’s neither here nor there.” He replaced the folder and sat beside Gull. “Johan ” he said earnestly, “.5 wants me to caution you that your next assignment may mean unusual danger.”

  “Really, sir? Oh, delightful!”

  “More than you think, perhaps,” said McIntyre darkly. “It isn’t merely our colleagues in the Black Hats this time. It’s mob hysteria, at least. Perhaps something far more sinister. Something’s up in Syrtis Major.”

  After fourteen years as an agent and innumerable hearings of those words, or of words very much like them, still a thrill tingled up the spine of Johan Gull. Something’s up in Syrtis Major—or Lacus Solis. Or the Southern Ice Cap. And he would be off again, off in the gratification of that headiest of addictions, the pitting of one’s wits and fine-trained body against the best the other side could come up with.

  And they were resourceful devils, he thought, with the journeyman’s unselfish admiration for a skilled worker at his own trade. Time and again it had taken all he possessed to win through against their strength and tricks. And if .5 felt it necessary to caution him that this coming exploit would be trickier than usual, it would indeed be something to remember.

  “Smashing,” he cried. “Would you care to brief me on it?”

  But McIntyre was shaking his head.

  “If you’d managed to get here on schedule—” he said; and then, “As it is, .5 has some rather urgent callers due in, let me see, mark! Forty seconds.”

  “I see,” said Johan Gull.

  “However,” McIntyre went on, “research has the whole picture for you. You’ll draw whatever supplies are necessary in Supply. Then Travel & Transport can arrange for your travel and transport Good-by, Gull.”

  “Right, sir,” said Gull, memorizing his instructions. His lips moved for a second and he nodded. “Got it So long, McIntyre. Good-by, sir.” He did not wait for an answer. It was well known that .5 disliked wasting breath on trivia, above all on the conventional exchange of greetings and farewells and unmeant inquiries as to the unimportant aspects of one’s health that passed for “politeness.”

  In the office these perfunctory pleasances were skipped. Gull let himself out, his heart pounding in spite of himself, and started toward the Research office and a new job.

  It was rather a nuisance, thought Gull as he lay sprawled in the barber’s chair, to go again through the process of being lathered, shaved, talced and brushed. But it did have advantages. One advantage was that it gave one a moment to oneself now and then.

  Johan Gull was a healthy young animal. He had an educated interest in food, drink and the attractions of women; a moment for reverie taken perforce, like this, was a luxury . . . the sort of luxury his active body was inclined to deny him when it had a choice He dreamed away the moments, hardly hearing the barber-robot’s taped drone—“How you think the Yanks gonna do? Say, you see this new ragazz? on the TV last night? Hoo!”—while his mind roamed the ochre wastes of Syrtis Major. He thought contentedly that he was ready for the assignment

  The jacket he was helped to put on bore on its cuff a quite unduplicable pattern of metal-linked lines and dots. Gull climbed the winding stairs down to the basement of the barber shop, held the sleeve to a scanning device and was admitted to the Research center.

  Lights, sounds and activity smote his senses. He blinked, pausing on the threshold of the room as the great steel door swung soundlessly closed behind him.

  As it never failed to do, the busy hum of Research thrilled him with a sense of the vast massive scope of Security’s incredibly complex operations. The chamber was more than thirty meters across. It was in the form of an amphitheater, with circles of desks descending toward the great central dais. There on a pivot, its axis inclined an exact 24°48' from the vertical, the great globe of Mars majestically turned, its cities and traffic-ways and canals etched out in colors that were softly glowing or startlingly bright. Here a rhythmic green flash pinpointed one of Security’s agents on active duty. There a crimson warning signal winked the presence of a known enemy operative. Patches of blue and orange indicated areas of military buildup or of temporary calm; white flashes showed Black Hat strongpoints under surveillance; .5’s own bases were gold.

  Any Black Hat field man would gladly have paid his life, and a bit more, for five minutes inside the Research chamber. It was the most secret installation in all Security’s vast net. In it, any of the three hundred trained technicians seated at their rows of desks on each step of the circle could look up and, in a moment, identify a trouble signal, record a “mission accomplished,” demand and get a dossier on any adult Martian citizen or guest, or put into operation any of .5’s magnificently daring ventures. And what was most impressive about it all, thought Gull, was that this infinitely detailed accumulation of expertise was duplicated in full in one other place—in the fecund convolutions of .5’s busy brain.

  Gull observed that the appropriate face of Mars was toward him now. He quickly sought the lines of the canals, followed them to Syrtis Major, paused and frowned.

  The whole mass of the area was glowing with a pale lavender radiance.

  Gull stood puzzled and faintly worried, until one of the girls at the circling desks rose and beckoned him. As he approached she sat down again and waved him to a chair. “Good afternoon, Mr. Gull” she said. “One moment until I get your account records.”

  Gull grinned, more amused than otherwise. “Oh, come off it, Gloria,” he said easily. “I know I was a stinker last night. But let’s not hold grudges.”

  She said stiffly, “Thank you for waiting, Mr. Gull. I have your records now.”

  Gull’s smile did not fade; he had observed the faint softening of the comers of her mouth. “Then let’s get to it,” he said genially.

  Her fingers had been busy on the console. A faxed sheet emerged from a slit on the lip of her desk and she read it carefully, nodding.

  “Ah, yes. I thought so,” said the girl. “It’s that flying saucer affair in Syrtis Major.”

  Gull’s smile vanished. He smote his brow. “Flying saucers! Of course.” Comprehension overspread his face and he nodded. “Saw the lavender on the globe, of course, but I must admit that for the moment I forgot my color-coding. Couldn’t remember that it meant flying saucers.”

  The girl was looking at him ruefully. “Oh, dear,” she sighed. “Johan, you’ve just earned yourself a one-hour refresher. You know .5s a stickler for keeping color-coding in your head.”

  Gull groaned, but she was adamant “No use fighting it It’ll do you good, dear. Now about this flying saucer thing.”

  She glanced over the faxed sheet to refresh her memory, then spoke. “About two weeks ago,” she said, “a couple of old mica prospectors reeled in off the desert with a story about having been captured by strange, godlike creatures who landed near their camp in a flying saucer. There’s a transcript of their stories on this tape”—she took a spool from the drawer of her desk and handed it to Gull—“but essentially what it comes to is that they said these creatures are so far superior to humans that they consider us to be domesticated animals at best”

  “Have the same feeling myself from time to time,” said Gull, pocketing the spool “I know that, dear. Anyway, nobody paid much attention. Not even when the prospectors swore they’d been given the power of walking through fire without being burned, putting themselves into catalepsy, even levitating themselves. However, then they began doing it in front of witnesses.” She took another spool of tape from her desk, then two more.

  “This one’s synoptic eye-witness accounts. This one’s a report from Engineering on possible ways that these phenomena may have been faked. And this other one’s a rebuttal from Unexplained Data, covering similar unexplained phenomena of the past forty-odd years.”

  “Keep an even balance, don’t we?” grinned Gull, pocketing the spools.

  “For God’s sake, Johan, don’t get them mixed up. Well, anyway. About h
alf of Syrtis Major decided the prospectors were fakes and tried to lynch them. The other half decided they were saints, and began to worship them. There’s a whole revivalist religion now. They think that the saucer people own us—”

  “Oh, yes,” said Gull. “I know about that part.” Indeed, it was hard not to have seen some of their riotous, chanting mass meetings, to dodge their interminable parades or to have failed to observe the slogans they had painted all over Marsport Dome.

  “Then you won’t need these other tapes.” Gloria sat back, frowning over her checklist. “Well, that’s about it, th—”

  A bright golden light flashed on the girl’s desk.

  In the middle of a word she stopped herself, picked up the scarlet hushphone marked Direct and listened. She nodded. “Right, sir,” she said, replaced the phone, made a quick notation on the fax sheet before her and returned to Gull.

  “—en,” she finished. “Any questions?”

  “I think not.”

  “Then here are your operating instructions, submarine reservations, identification papers and disguise kit.” She handed him another reel of tape, a ticket envelope, a punch-coded card with a rather good likeness of an idealized Johan Gull on it and a bottle of hair color.

  Gull accepted them and stowed them away. But he paused at the girl’s desk, looking at her thoughtfully. “Say. Would you like me to take you home tonight?”

  “Good heavens, no. I haven’t forgiven you that much.” She made two check marks on the fax sheet. “Anyway, you won’t have time.”

  “Why do you say that? My submarine doesn’t leave for four hours—”

  She smiled. “That call was from .5’s office.”

  Gull said gloomily. “Cripes. I suppose that means extra lines.”

  “Absolutely essential you complete two one-hour refresher courses before leaving,” the girl quoted. “McIntyre was quite emphatic. Said to remind you that .5 was a stickler for maintaining high levels of training; half-trained agents jeopardize missions.” Gull sighed but surrendered. No doubt .5 was right “What’s the score?” he asked.

  “One hour in color-code recognition, but don’t think I reported you. Probably .5’s office was monitoring us. The other—let me see—oh, yes. Basic fuse-spitting, refresher course. Good luck, Johan. Drop me a card from Syrtis Major.”

  Gull kissed her lightly and left. He paused in the entranceway, studying his tickets and operating orders. He was faintly puzzled.

  That in itself was all right. He remembered and liked the feeling. It was a good sign; it was the operations where one couldn’t quite see the drift at first that often turned out to be the most exciting and rewarding. Yet he wished he knew how this mission was going to be.

  He turned his back on the flickering, darting lights that came from the great turning Martian globe and began to trudge up the stairs. All right, so Syrtis Major had got the wind up. Mass hysteria, surely. In itself, that sort of thing was hardly worth Security’s while to bother with. There was no sign of the opposition’s fine Machiavellian hand in it, less reason to believe that there would be real danger.

  Yet McIntyre had warned of “unusual danger.”

  Surely he was wrong. Unless . . .

  Unless, thought Johan Gull with a touch of wonder, as he sat back in the barber’s chair and felt the warm lather gliding along his cheek, as the shoeshine robot waited to pull the lever that would drop him into the chute to Plans & Training . . . unless there really were people from flying saucers on Mars.

  III

  Smells of fungi, smells of the sea. The tang of hot-running metal machinery and the reek of stale sewage. Johan Gull expanded his chest and sucked in the thousand fragrances of the Martian waterfront as he shouted: “Boy! My bags. To my cabin, chop-chop!”

  He followed the lascar-robot at a slow self-satisfied pace, dropping ashes from his panatella, examining the fittings of the submarine with the knowing eye of the old Martian hand. He did indeed feel well pleased with himself.’

  In the role Costumery had set up for him, that of a well-to-do water merchant from the North Polar Ice Cap, he had arrived at the docks in a custom Caddy. He cast largesse to the winds, ordered up a fine brandy to his cabin and immediately plunged into a fresh-water bath. When you were playing a part, it was as well to play a wealthy one, he thought contentedly; and when he had luxuriated in his bath for fifteen minutes and felt the throb of the hydrojets announce the ship’s getting under weigh, he emerged to dress and play his tapes with a light heart.

  To all intents and purposes, Gull must have seemed the very archetype of a rich water vendor of substantial, but not yet debilitating, age. He sat at ease, listening to the tapes through a nearly invisible earplug and doing his nails. He did not touch the eye patch which gave his face distinction, nor did he glance toward the framed portrait of Abdel Gamal Nasser behind which, he rather thought, a hidden camera-eye was watching his every move. Let them damned well look. They could find nothing.

  He sat up, stretched, yawned, lighted an expensive Pittsburgh stogie, blew one perfect smoke ring and resumed his task.

  The T Coronae Borealis was a fine old ship of the Finucane-American line. As a matter of fact Johan Gull had voyaged in her more than a time or two before, and he looked forward with considerable pleasure to his dinner that night at the captain’s table, to a spot of gambling in the card room, perhaps—who knew?—to a heady tete-a-tete with one of the lovely ladies he had observed as he boarded. The voyage to Heliopolis was sixteen hours by submarine, or just time enough for one’s glands to catch up with the fact that one had changed one’s mise-en-scene. Ballistic rockets, of course, would do it in fifty minutes. In Johan Gull’s opinion, ballistic travel was for barbs. And he was grateful that Mars’s atmosphere would not support that hideous compromise between grace and speed, the jet plane. No, thought Gull complacently. Of all the modes of transport he had sampled on six worlds and a hundred satellites, submarining through the Martian canals was the only one fit for a man of taste.

  He snapped off the last of the tapes and considered his position. He heard with one ear the distant, feminine song of T Coronae’s nuclear hydrojets. Reassuring. With every minute that passed they were two-fifths of a mile closer to the junction of four canals where Heliopolis, the Saigon of Syrtis Major, sat wickedly upon its web of waters and waited for its prey.

  Gull wondered briefly what he would find there. And as he wondered, he smiled.

  The knock on the door was firm without being peremptory. “Another brandy, sir?” called a voice from without.

  “No, thank you, steward,” said Gull. No Martian water vendor would arrive at dinner half slopped over. Neither would Gull—if not because of the demands of his role, then because of the requirements of good manners to the handiwork of T Coronaes master chef. Anyway, he observed by his wrist chronometer that it was time to think things over.

  He reviewed what he had heard on the tapes.

  Those two prospectors, he thought. Damned confusing thing.

  Their names, he recalled, were Harry Rosencranz and Clarepce T. Reik. He had checked their dossiers back to pre-emigration days. There had been nothing of interest there: Rosencranz an ex-unemployed plumber from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Reik a cashiered instructor in guerrilla tactics from the nearby Command & General Staff School. Like so many of Earth’s castoffs, they had scraped together money to cover passage to Mars, and enough over to outfit one expedition. They had managed to subsist ever since on what scrubby topazes they could scratch out of the sands of the Great Northern Desert. With, thought Gull, no doubt a spot of smuggling to make ends meet. Duty-free Martian souvenirs into the city, and chicle for the natives out. So much for Harry Rosencranz and Clarence T. Reik, thought Gull, blowing gently on the second coat of polish and commencing to buff his nails to a soft gleam. But it was not who the prospectors were that mattered. It was what they had had to say . . . and above all, what they had done.

  Gull paused and frowned.

  Th
ere was something he could not recognize in the atmosphere. A soft hint of fragrance—tantalizing—it strove to recall something to him, but he could not be sure what. A place? But what place? A girl?

  He shook his head. There could be no girl here. He put the thought from his mind and returned to the two prospectors and their strange story.

  Their testimony far outran the parameters of normal credibility. Gull could repeat the important parts of what they had said almost verbatim. Reik had been the more loquacious of the two—

  Well, Harry was like cooking up our mulligan outside the tent when I thought I heard him yell something. I Stuckey. One minute, Mr. Reik. You couldn’t hear what he said clearly?

  A. Well, not what you’d call clearly. You see I had the TV sound up pretty loud. Can’t hear much when you got the TV sound up pretty loud.

  Q. Go on.

  A. Well, I just reached out and turned off the set and stuck my neck out the flap. Geez! There it was. Big as life and twice as scary. It was a flying saucer, all right It glowed with like a sort of pearly light that made you feel—I dunno how to say it, exactly—like, peaceful.

  Q. Peaceful?

  A. Not only that. Good. It made me sorry I was such a rat.

  Q. Go on.

  A. Well, anyway, after a minute a door opened with like a kind of a musical note. F sharp, I’d say. Harry, he thought it was F natural. Well, we got to fighting over that, and then we looked up and there were these three, uh, creatures. Extraterrestrials, like. They told us they had long watched the bickerings and like that of Earthmen and they had come to bring us wisdom and peace. They had this sealed book that would make us one with the Higher Creation. So we took a couple—

  Q. They gave you each one?

  A. Oh, no. I mean, they didn’t give them to us. They sold them to us. Twenty-five bucks apiece. We paid them in topazes.