Agent of the Unknown

by Margaret St. Clair

  He wanted to wail aloud in his confusion and his misery. But when he looked down, he saw that the fetters had fallen from his hands.

  Chapter Sixteen — The Polar Force

  After that, Don stayed on the beach. When he was thirsty, walked inland to the little spring with the agate pebbles and drank sweet water. He was not hungry; he felt no need for food all the time he was on the beach. Sometimes he would walk into the surf and clean himself.

  He sat in the sand and watched the sun coming up and the sun setting. It went by before his eyes and meant nothing. He had lost much emotional blood.

  He did not suffer; he was too remote from himself to be capable of suffering. But when the doll had finally left him, he had lost the effective motor force of his life. There was a hole where his will had been.

  Early in his stay on the beach, he tried to rouse himself. The SSP, he felt certain, would make an attempt to recapture him, and Fyon would surely be the place where they would look first. But time passed and he did nothing. In the end, he made a hole in the sand and buried the fetters in it. The effort exhausted him, and after it he withdrew even more deeply from himself.

  Nobody bothered him. Once a party of tourists, talking and laughing, came down to the beach. They looked at him obliquely and nervously, and rather soon they went away. In the end it was Payne, out of all the people in Baade who knew him, who came to talk to him.

  He came walking over the pink sand toward him, his heavy shoes squelching a little. He was wearing his white restaurant apron. "Hello, Don," he said. He sat down beside him and cleared his throat. "The tourists said there was a man on the beach. I thought it might be you."

  Don made no answer. Payne went on, "We all thought the SSP had picked you up. That can't have been right, though, because you're still on Fyon. Where have you been, anyway? The SSP never lets anybody go."

  Payne stopped talking and looked at Haig closely. He gave a nervous laugh. "See here, Don, what's the matter with you?"

  "... I'm tired."

  "Yes, but ... Hell, Don, you can't just stay here on the beach." His tone coaxed and argued. "There was some point in living like that when you were drinking all the time. I don't say I approved of it, of course. But it made a sort of sense. Now you're just sitting here in the sand and—hell, Haig, I know you're not drinking. What's the sense in it?"

  Don hunched his shoulders. Payne said, "Did you know the SSP did pick up Henry? Came in the bar one day at noon and got him. And Phyllis, that girl that worked at the curio counter—she's disappeared. Everybody thinks there must have been some funny stuff going on in the bar."

  Even that name meant nothing. Don felt no emotion. Payne was looking at him anxiously. "Why don't you come back to Baade and work for me?" he asked after a pause. "It wasn't much of a job, but you got by. Better than living in the sand by yourself. And I get mighty tired of pitting dakdak pods."

  "No."

  "Hell, don't just say 'no'. If you're sick, we'll send you to the hospital. You know, Don, Baade—Fyon—is changing. Somehow." Payne's face became shy and a little strange.

  "Well, I guess we're all ... changing. You ought to come back. Are you sick? What's the matter with you?"

  Don made an exhausting effort. "I'm all right," he answered. "It's just that I'm ... bankrupt. Please go away."

  Payne got to his feet. He did not seem angry or even offended, only a little surprised. "I guess I know what you mean," he said. "I guess it could affect a person like that." He walked a few steps away and then turned.

  "I'm sorry, Don," he said. "Maybe you'll get over it." Don was left alone on the beach.

  Nobody came after that, not even tourists. Sometimes Don wondered whether he had not died. The fantasy might have pleased him, except that he did not really believe in it. He knew he was still alive.

  Days went by, days in which time was as smooth as velvet, as smooth as cream, as smooth as glass. The wind blew softly against his face and he sat on the beach in the sand and was nobody. But it came to an end at last.

  That morning he woke feeling a little less empty than he had been. He had dreamed a little in the night, he thought. He yawned and stretched, sniffing at the air. The action struck him as somehow ridiculous, and he laughed. It was the first emotion he had displayed since he had realized that the doll was really gone.

  He was serious again in a moment. It was, as he realized immediately, no laughing matter. Something was waking up in him, and he didn't want it to waken. He didn't want to return to feeling again, to personal experience. He dreaded it as one dreads the painful return of circulation to a numbed limb. All day he sat on the beach and fought the new thing in him. But by nightfall he was aware of something pulling him.

  It was not an emotion; he thought he could have resisted an emotion more easily. This was a pull, neither quite physical nor quite psychic, on something in his head. It was a pull toward a particular point. He could look out across the sea, into the sky turning dark after the burning sunset, and almost name the point on the horizon he thought it was coming from.

  It grew dark. He began to walk up and down the beach restlessly. The sand went sss sss sss against his feet. With every hour the longing grew more intense. When the night was half over he started into Baade to ask Payne to help him, but after a few steps he turned back. He knew it would be useless.

  The stars moved slowly along the sky toward dawn. He could not sleep. He was glad when morning came at last.

  As soon as it was light enough for him to see, he went along the beach to the left till he came to the little jetty that served Baade's pleasure craft. Four or five boats were tied up along it, bobbing up and down gently in the early morning swell.

  He decided on the glossy red cabin cruiser the guests of the hotel had very occasionally used. There were patches of discoloration on its corrosion-resistant metal. For a moment he stood hesitating beside it. He didn't want to go. But he could no more resist the pull on him than a compass needle can refuse to turn to the north.

  He untied the painter and dropped down into the boat. His joints felt creaky and disused. He looked at the fuel gauge and found it read three-quarters full. He kicked the motor over, wondering whether it would start. It made a lot of noise, and he hoped nobody in Baade would hear him. But it was still very early, and the little town was asleep.

  He sent the cruiser away from the jetty in a long curving furrow of white foam. He headed it toward the point on the horizon from which the force was coming that drew him so irresistibly.

  Chapter Seventeen — Vulcan Calls Them Home

  Don sailed for a day and a night before he came to the island. It was nearly on the other side of Fyon from Baade, the little town. During part of the night he slept; when he woke at dawn, shivering with cold, he saw the cruiser's white wake stretching out straight behind him, kilo after kilo, as far as he could see, in the level water. He had kept course undeviatingly while he slept.

  The island itself was about half a kilo across, and as round as if it had been turned out on a drawing board with compasses. It had, in fact, served as a substation for the builders during the creation of Fyon, and nobody had troubled to disguise its essentially artificial nature with trees, bushes, or indented shore line. It was a disk, a tablet, of durastone, with a few sheds in the middle where some of the planetoid's permanent machinery was.

  Don moored his craft at the service wharf and scrambled up on it. During the voyage his indifference and alienation had left him, and now that he was here he felt an almost trembling eagerness to understand—to understand at last, to solve, discover, know. He was sure that the answer was here. He hurried toward the sheds.

  When he got up to them, he saw that they were arranged around a clear area that must have served for unloading. In the middle of the clear area, hardly seeming to rest against the durastone, was a strange small ship.

  It looked, at first glance, very much like the space needles Don was familiar with. But its fins were different, and so were its re
tractors. Oddest of all, it was skinned, not with the universal beryllium alloy, but with some redly gleaming coppery stuff. Its entrance hatch was open wide.

  As Don stood looking at it, Kunitz came around from behind the ship's nose and spoke to him.

  "Hello, Don," he said. He smiled faintly. "I have been waiting for you."

  He looked almost exactly as he had when Don had last seen him. He was still wearing the faded blue trousers and the sleeveless undershirt. He seemed a little taller than Don had remembered him, and his face was at once more careworn and more dignified. For the first time Don noticed the muscles of his arms and shoulders, and his small, neat, careful craftsman's hands.

  "Waiting for me?" Don echoed after a moment. "What do you mean by that?"

  Kunitz did not answer the question directly. "Come inside, Don," he said, "and sit down. I imagine there are things you'll want to discuss."

  He led the way into the ship. Don followed him mutely. "Sit on the bunk, Don," Kunitz said when they were inside. "It's the most comfortable."

  There were the bunk, a seat, a table. The interior of the ship was marvelously neat and compact. And on the table, shining a little in the subdued light, stood the doll.

  Vulcan's doll, the doll Don had had for so long, the doll that had vanished on the beach. "What is she doing here?" Don asked when he could speak. "How did you get the doll?"

  "I called her back to me," Kunitz answered gravely. "I'm going home, Don. She was mine."

  Kunitz was going home. Going home with the doll that he had called to him because she was his. Don recalled his old doubts about him. "You—then you're Vulcan," Don said.

  "Yes."

  There was a long silence. Kunitz sat quietly, his hands resting half closed on his thigh. Once he coughed. At last Don said, "Why did you lie to me? That story about your daughter—and all the other lies. You've told me so many lies."

  Kunitz inclined his head. "I'm sorry, Don. It was necessary."

  "But why?"

  "The story about my daughter? The story itself was quite true, though it did not happen to me. I told it, primarily, to keep you in contact with the doll while you were listening to me. I knew that in an hour or so the tie between you and it would be formed, and after that you would be unwilling—or unable—to part with her. But before that I was afraid you might trade her for a drink, give her away for a whim—anything. I had to keep you quiet while the tie had time to form."

  "You warned me over and over to get rid of her," Don said.

  "I know," Kunitz replied, agreeing. "I wanted you to be warned. I could not let you run so many risks without having warned you. And then"—he smiled—"I was counting on your stubbornness."

  Don had turned white. "It wasn't fair," he said, controlling himself.

  "I'm sorry, Don," Kunitz said for the second time.

  Don got up from the bunk and walked around the cabin before he answered. The morning sunlight, coming in through the open hatch, lay on a rectangle on the floor. Don said, "Was it true what Mulciber told me, that I've been nothing but a cat's-paw in this? Did you leave the doll for me to find on the beach?"

  "Yes, I left the doll on the beach," Vulcan replied thoughtfully. "But a cat's-paw? No, the word is too strong. You had to be left free to think and choose and act; I could only try to direct your actions. You were, at most, a tool."

  "Vulcan's tool," Don said, his face twitching. "Tell me. Tell me, a tool for what? It isn't very pleasant to think that the whole time I was being manipulated. What was the struggle between you and Mulciber? I want to know the difference between the truth and the lies you told."

  Vulcan's face darkened, but the expression of his eyes did not change. "Yes, you have a right to know," he said equitably.

  "I suppose I had better start with the doll, and how she was made. A century or two ago—no, I am not immortal, Don, but I have lived a very long time"—Don saw the shadow of an inexpressible weariness for a moment on Vulcan's face—"a century or two ago Mulciber and I worked together on the doll. The first doll, the one in the museum, was my practice piece. It was in my workshop, the shop they say is situated at the end of the galaxy. The location will do, though it is not quite accurate.

  "The plan for the doll, the design, were mine. Yet Mulciber had great skill. Though the wings had been assigned to him, and I had taken the body, as being more difficult, we worked together. We helped each other with the shaping. I mean by that that the doll was a joint work, one which even I alone could scarcely duplicate.

  "From his contact with the corrosive life in the doll, Mulciber got his bodily stigmata, for instance the abnormal growth of papillae on his tongue. He also got—did he tell you?—a life span augmented far beyond that common to human beings. I had told him how the contact with my doll could be used to that end. I do not think he was grateful to me.

  "He had great skill, but he grew jealous. I did not realize how consumed he was with jealousy. He envied me because, with all his skill, he could never be anything but Mulciber, while I remained Vulcan." Vulcan's voice held the assurance of one who states a self-evident fact. "Vulcan, the master of life and half-life. So, when he thought it was safe, he stole the wings and fled.

  "I hunted him. For years, on a handful of planets, I hunted him. I am not without resources, but he was crafty. The years passed. They transformed the jealousy and hate he felt toward me into a hatred of all mankind, as you perceived. Then he disappeared. And when I found him again, he had used his jealousy and hate as crutches to climb to the top of the SSP.

  "I knew where he was. He was too eminent to evade me. Yet, as head of a very powerful organization, he was well protected. I had to use my doll as bait to draw him into the open, to lead him to expose himself.

  "Yes, I put the doll in the sand of the beach so you would find her. If not that morning, then on another. No one ever went to that stretch of beach but you. I knew that when you had the doll you would display her. And then Mulciber must reach out for her and expose himself."

  "And you say I wasn't your cat's-paw?" Don said. He laughed. The patch of sunlight on the floor had moved.

  "I think not," Vulcan answered evenly. "I ran many risks. There was always the danger that you would be persuaded or, before the tie had grown so strong, intimidated into parting with the doll. The great danger, you see, was that the doll, without you, would fall into Mulciber's hands. Then he could destroy her. Oh, I had bad moments. But in the end my plan was accomplished, and the SSP captured you. Mulciber introduced his own destruction into his citadel."

  Don was looking at him incredulously. "It was your plan to have the SSP capture me? Like the great horse of Troy? Then your offers of help, your—" he choked. "Do you mean that you betrayed me to the SSP when I was in the hemisphere?"

  Vulcan nodded. "Yes," he answered nakedly.

  "Then Phyllis—"

  "I am sorry. I am truly sorry about the girl. It was no part of my plan that she should suffer. I tried to make sure that she would not be in the hemisphere. I told her to come to talk to me that night as soon as she could. But she stayed."

  "You killed her," Don said. Then, after a moment, "No. I did."

  "You asked her to stay?" Vulcan nodded, as if to himself. "Yes. That was ... fate."

  "How could you know that I would kill Mulciber?"

  "Why, what else could you do?" Vulcan answered, as if surprised. "All he was able to do was to sever the gross tie between you and the doll. A finer, subtler tie of psychic energy remained. If his death had not come in exactly that way, it would have come in another. I was watching you, you know. It was through my shadow that you escaped.

  "But now it is over. When you joined the wings to the doll, the tie between you and it was finally severed. And now that she is complete, the changes will come. My doll has helped humanity to change."

  The cabin was quiet. Outside, a sea bird gave a harsh, grating cry. Don saw it through the open hatch, twisting and turning against the wind. In a sudden access of bitter
ness, he said, "I don't know how you dare."

  "Eh?" Vulcan sounded genuinely puzzled. "Dare? What do you mean?"

  "Dare to manipulate us so casually." Don choked. He went on passionately, "How are you any better than Mulciber? He hated humanity—he envied us our future and wouldn't leave us free to change. He wanted to force us to stay as we were.

  "You leave us no more free than he did. You have determined our destiny for us. We aren't choosers now. We will do what you have decided that we ought to do, like puppets. You'll pull the strings, and we'll obey you. Is all humanity to be your living dolls?"

  Vulcan smiled. He said, with extreme gentleness, "It is not like that.

  "Humanity will shape its own future. I am not capable, even if I dared, of directing it as you think. My doll was, in the end, nothing but a focus for psychic force. Not one human being will change otherwise than he was capable of changing, in any case, because of her. She has only liberated and wakened a sleeping force.

  "And she has helped whatever was already in their bodies as a potentiality to come to conscious will. The men and women of science will point out the way. And the force that rose from body to mind will act on the body again.

  "I shall not shape humanity's future. I do not even imagine it. It is so rich in possibilities and potentialities that it is, strictly speaking, unimaginable.

  "Perhaps human beings will want greater vital force, and a man of the future will be as much more 'alive' than a man of today is, as a present-day human being is more alive than a lizard. Perhaps they will want a greater life span or augmented intellectual and psychic powers.

  "Perhaps they will decide to develop possibilities of which we nowadays are wholly ignorant. Perhaps there will be winged human beings who will inhabit the air as fish do the water. Perhaps there will be human beings who will be able to tolerate the cold one way or another, they will imagine wings for themselves.

  "Don, when you came in the ship, you were so amazed at seeing my doll that you did not really observe her. Look at her carefully." He gestured toward the table.