Lisbon Cubed

by William Tenn

  As Alfred said nothing, John Smith took his silence for agreement with these high principles and went on; “You can’t get out of this cell—it’s a spun web of pure chrok, practically unbreakable. But the worst of it, of course, is its insulating quality: you can’t phmpff through chrok if you stand on your head. I’ve tried to phmpff for help until I almost fractured an antenna—couldn’t raise a whisper. That’s why they don’t have to split up their force to guard us. And that’s why I haven’t bothered to come out of my uniform to talk to you: if we can’t phmpff we’ll make more sense to each other with the jaw attachments of our uniforms.”

  Grateful for this small mercy, Alfred began to look around at the enclosing walls of chrok. “How about using these—these jaw attachments to get help?” he suggested. “Sound seems to go through. We could try yelling together.”

  “And who would hear you? Humans. What could they do?”

  Alfred spread his hands. “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes—even humans can be—”

  “No, forget about it. Things are bad, but they’re not that bad. Besides, these walls are especially thick and there are no cracks in them. If those Lidsgallians hadn’t come down a couple of times a day to change the air, I’d have suffocated by now. As it was, I was in a bad way a couple of times and had to fall back on the reserve air supply in the chest—you know, the compartment right over the control cubicle? But I’ll tell you this, if I ever get back to Vaklitt in one piece, there’s a modification of our uniform I’ll really try to talk Command Central into making. I thought of it while I was watching them search you. Do away with the air reserve in the chest. I’ll tell Robinson—how often, when you come right down to it, does one of our Special Emissaries ever find himself drowning or in the middle of a poison-gas war?—and find some way an agent can take a weapon—a real, honest, claw-operated weapon, into his uniform-disguise with him. Although come to think of it, you’d need some sort of turret arrangement coming out of the human flesh to fire it, and those Lidsgallians, once they found out about it, would—”

  He rambled on. Alfred, watching him, realized how hungry he’d been for companionship. And this talkative mood might be put to use. They both might be in a Lidsgallian torture chamber somewhere out in the galaxy in a couple of hours, but there was a very slender chance that they might not. And, besides, facts were always useful; he could cope with whatever lay ahead a bit more easily if he only had some coherent facts on which to base his plans. This was the time, if ever, to find out who was the greater menace to Earth, the Vaklittians or the Lidsgallians—and who was more likely to accept the proffer of friendship from a badly frightened, torture-leery human.

  Only—he had to be careful how he phrased the questions. He had to be prepared to cover up any blunders quickly.

  “Why do you think,” he asked carelessly, “the Lidsgallians hate us so much? Oh, I know the usual answers, but I’m interested in hearing your opinion. You seem to have a very refreshing slant.”

  John Smith grunted appreciatively, thought for a moment, then shrugged. “The usual answers are the only answers in this case. It’s the war. Naturally.”

  “Just the war? That’s all, you think?”

  “Just the war? What do you mean, just the war? How can an interstellar war, going on across two-thirds of the galaxy for almost three centuries, be just the war? Trillions upon trillions of individuals killed, dozens upon dozens of fertile planets smashed into space dust—you call that just the war? You youngsters must really be growing up pretty cynical these days!”

  “I—I didn’t mean it quite like that,” Alfred said rapidly, placatingly. “Of course, the war—it’s a terrible business, and all that. Awful. Positively horrible. Sickening, sickening. And our enemy, those vicious Lidsgallians—”

  John Smith looked sandbagged. “What? The Lidsgallians aren’t our enemies—they’re our allies!”

  It was Alfred’s turn under the sandbag. “Our allies?” he repeated weakly, wondering how he was ever going to get out of this one. “Our allies?” he said again, trying a different intonation on for size and the bare possibility of sense.

  “I don’t know what the Academy’s coming to any more,” John Smith muttered to himself. “In my day, you got a good general education there, with just enough lab work in espionage to warrant giving you a commission in the Service if you filled all the other requirements. You came out of the Academy as a wide-awake, cultured interstellar citizen, with a good background in history, economics, art, science, and total terroristic warfare. On top of that, you had, whenever you wanted to use it, a decent and honorable trade—spying—under your belt. Of course, if you wanted to specialize, you could always go back, after graduation, for intensive study in elementary and advanced ciphers, creative disguise design, plain and fancy lying, physical and mental torture, narrow fields of scholarship like that. But that used to be strictly postgraduate work. Now—now, everything is specialization. They turn out dewy youngsters who can crack any code in space, but can’t tell a simple espionage lie to save their heads; they graduate kids who can knock out a masterpiece of a uniform-disguise, but don’t even know the difference between a Lidsgallian and a Pharseddic! Mark my words, this overspecialization will be the death of the Academy yet!”

  “I agree with you,” Alfred told him with ringing sincerity. He thought for a moment and decided to underline his bona fides. “Shoemaker, stick to your last. A place for everything and everything in its place. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Look to the ant, thou sluggard!” He found he was going off the track and stopped himself. “But you see, the way the Academy feels today, its graduates will go into active service and meet older, more experienced men like yourself who can give them this general political orientation right on the spot. Now, of course, in a way, I really knew all the time that the actual enemy, in the deeper sense of the word, so to speak, were the Pharseddics, but—”

  “The Pharseddics? Our enemy? But the Pharseddics are the neutrals—the only neutrals! Look here, youngster, and try to get it straight in your mind for once. You absolutely can’t do a first-class job of espionage on Earth unless you know the general principles and the background data from which they’re derived. To begin with, the Lidsgallians were attacked by the Garoonish, right?”

  Alfred assented with a positive shake of his head. “Right! Any school child knows that.”

  “All right, then. We had to go to war with the Garoonish, not because we had anything particular against them, or liked the Lidsgallians, but because if the Garoonish won they would then be in a position to conquer the Mairunians who were our only possible allies against the growing power of the Ishpolians.”

  “Naturally,” Alfred murmured. “Under the circumstances, there was no alternative.”

  “Well, that forced the Garoonish to make common cause with the Ossfollians. The Ossfollians activated their mutual assistance pact with the Kenziash of the Rigel region, and, out of fear of the Kenziash, the Ishpolians joined forces with us and pushed the Mairunians into the Garoonish camp. Then came the Battle of the Ninth Sector in which the Ossfollians switched sides four times and which resulted in the involvement of the Menyemians, the Kazkafians, the Doksads, and even the Kenziash of the Procyon and Canopus regions. After that, of course, the war got a lot more complicated.”

  Alfred wet his lips. “Yes, of course. Then it got complicated.” He decided, for the sake of sanity, to bring matters much closer to present time and place. “Meanwhile, here on Earth, there are the spies of—the spies of—Pardon me, but in your opinion just how many of these belligerents operate espionage networks on Earth? Regularly, I mean.”

  “All of them! Every single one of them! Including the Pharseddics, who have to know what’s going on if they’re to maintain their neutrality. Earth, as I hope you remember from your first-year course in Elementary Secrecy, is ideally situated just outside the usual battle zones but within easy access of almost all the belligerents. It’s the only place left where information
can be transmitted across the combat lines and deals can be made back and forth—and, as such, it’s zealously respected by everyone. After all, it was on Earth that we sold out the Doksads, and where the annihilation of the Menyemians was arranged by their allies, the Mairunians and the Kazkafians. Just as now we have to watch our own oldest allies, the Lidsgallians, who have been trying to make contact with the Garoonish for the purpose of concluding a separate peace. I got the proof—I even found out the specific time and place the contact was to be made and what the arrangements were to be—but then I ran afoul of that female with her yacker of Cleveland contests she won three years ago. And I got caught.”

  “The contact was to be made through a beauty contest of some sort, wasn’t it?”

  The middle-aged man looked impatient. “Naturally a beauty contest. Of course a beauty contest. How else would anyone go about contacting a bunch like the Garoonish?”

  “I couldn’t imagine,” Alfred laughed weakly. “The Garoonish, after all!” He sat in silence, absolutely unable to close mentally with the picture John Smith had evoked. The closest he could come to it was a memory of something he had read about Lisbon during the Second World War. But this was Lisbon squared, Lisbon cubed, Lisbon raised to some incredible exponential power. All Earth was a vast labyrinth of spy-threaded Lisbon. Spies, counterspies, counter-counterspies…

  Just what, he suddenly wondered, was the correct human population of Earth? Was it a larger proportion of the total population figures than that of the disguised interstellar agents, and by how much? Or was it possibly, was it conceivably, somewhat smaller?

  Life had been a lot simpler with PuzzleKnit Nylons, he decided, and that was his only real conclusion.

  John Smith nudged him. “Here they come. It’s off to Lidsgall for us.”

  They rose to their feet as the wall opened. Two men and a woman came in, dressed in street clothing. They each carried in one hand a small suitcase that looked heavy, and, in the other, the small, red cylindrical weapon.

  Alfred eyed the cylinders and found himself getting tense with a dangerous idea. The weapon hadn’t bothered him much before and it had supposedly been set to stun him. Well, perhaps the woman had made a mistake in her setting—and perhaps the metabolisms of Man and Vaklittian were so different that a charge that would knock out the one would merely give the other a slightly upset stomach. Then again, if Earth were so carefully maintained in her ignorance as John Smith had indicated, there might be no setting on the weapon that would damage a native terrestrial at all: in the normal course of their intrigues with and against and around each other, these people might be enjoined by their own laws and by mutual agreement from carrying weapons that could damage humans.

  But if he were wrong? It still might take them quite a bit of time to tumble to the fact that the Vaklittian frequencies were having no important effect on him, and he might manage a lot of action in that time. The alternative, at any rate, was to be pulled off Earth in just a few minutes and deposited, some time in the near future, in an extraterrestrial torture chamber. Even if he were able to prove his humanity to their satisfaction, they would still have to dispose of him in some way—and the various devices of the torture chamber would be so handy…

  No question about it: people who go in for torture chambers do not make good hosts.

  One of the men fiddled with his suitcase, and the transparent cube dissolved around Alfred and John Smith. In response to the gestures made with the weapons, they walked gingerly across the floor. They were motioned through the open wall.

  Alfred found it difficult to recognize Mme. Du Barry and the Huguenot without their masks and costumes.

  They both looked much like the new man with them, not bad, not good, just faces-in-a-crowd. Which, of course, was exactly how they wanted it.

  He reached his decision as the five of them began walking through the opening in the wall. For the moment, they were closely bunched together, even bumping against each other.

  He grabbed the woman by the arm and swung her violently against the Huguenot, who staggered confusedly. Then, knowing that John Smith was between him and the new man in the rear, he hitched up his cassock and started to run. He turned left, and again left—and found himself in the main basement corridor. Ahead, at the far end, was a flight of stone stairs leading up to the street.

  Behind him, there was the noise of struggle, then the sound of feet running in pursuit. He heard John Smith distantly yell: “Go it, laddie, go it! Over the hill! Slide, Kelly, slide! Ride ’em, cowboy! It’s the last lap—full speed ahead! Shake a leg! Hit the road!” Then the Vaklittian’s voice abruptly disappeared in a breathless grunt after the sound of a wallop.

  A pinkish glow shot past him, moved back and over to light up his mid-section. He belched. The glow turned light red, deep red, dark, vicious red. He belched more frequently. He reached the stairs and was clambering up them as the glow became a throbbing, night-like purple.

  Ten minutes later, he was on Sixth Avenue, getting into a cab. He had a mildly unpleasant bellyache. It rapidly subsided.

  He looked behind him as they drove to his hotel. No pursuit. Good. The Lidsgallians would have no idea where he lived.

  Did they look like the Vaklittians, he wondered? Spiders? Hardly, he decided. All these different racial names and these titanic interstellar animosities suggested many, many separate forms. They’d have to be small enough to fit into a normal human body, though. Snail-like creatures, possibly, and worm-like ones. Crab-like ones and squid-like ones. Perhaps even rat-like ones?

  On the whole, a dreadfully unpleasant subject. He needed a good night’s sleep: tomorrow would be his first day at BlakSeme. And, then, after a bit, when he’d had a chance to think it all out, he’d decide what to do. The police, the F.B.I., or whatever. Maybe even take the whole story to one of the New York newspapers—or some top television commentator might be more sympathetic and reach a bigger audience. His story would have to be coherent and convincing, though. He’d have little proof; the Lidsgallians were probably on their way back to their home planet as of this very moment. But there was his own gang—the Vaklittians. Cohen and Kelly and Jones. And Jane Doe. He’d kid them along for a couple of days and then use them for proof. It was time Earth knew what was going on.

  His own gang was waiting for him in his hotel room. Cohen and Kelly and Jones. And Jane Doe. They looked as if they’d been waiting for a long time. Jane Doe looked as if she’d been crying. Mr. Kelly was sitting on the bed with his open briefcase on his knees.

  “So there you are,” said Robinson’s voice from the briefcase. “I hope you have an explanation, Smith. I only hope you have an explanation.”

  “For what?” he asked irritably. He’d been looking forward to getting out of his costume, taking a hot shower, and then bed. This late performance of “I spy” was very annoying. Repetitious, too.

  “For what?” Robinson roared. “For what? Kelly, tell him for what!”

  “Look here, Smith,” Kelly demanded. “Did you or didn’t you ask the desk clerk to find out about a plumbers’ fancy dress ball?”

  “I did. Of course, I did. He got all the information I needed.”

  There was a howl from the briefcase. “He got all the information I needed! Six years of general studies in espionage at the Academy, a year of post-graduate work in Intensive Secrecy, six months at the Special Service School in Data-Sifting and Location-Tracing—and you have the nerve to stand there with your carapace in your claws and tell me that the only way of tracking down this fancy dress ball you could think of was to ask the desk clerk—an ordinary everyday human desk-clerk—to find out about it for you!”

  Alfred noticed that the faces around him were all extremely grave. Despite his weariness and strong feelings of indifference, he made an effort to conciliate. “Well, if he was only an ordinary, everyday human, I fail to see the harm that—”

  “He could have been the Garoonish Minister of War for all you knew!” the briefcase bl
asted. “Not that it made any difference. By the time he’d questioned his various sources and mentioned the matter to his various friends, acquaintances and business associates, every spy organization in the galaxy had been alerted. They knew what we were worrying about, what we were looking for, and where and when we hoped to find it. You accomplished one of the best jobs of interstellar communication ever. Sixty-five years of patient espionage planning gone down the drain. Now what have you to say for yourself?”

  Alfred stood up straight and manfully pulled back his shoulders. “Just this. I’m sorry.” He considered for a moment, then added: “Deeply and truly sorry.”

  Some kind of electrical storm seemed to go off in the briefcase. It almost rolled off Kelly’s knees.

  “I just can’t stand this any more,” Jane Doe said suddenly. “I’ll wait outside.” She walked past Alfred to the door, her eyes swimming in reproachfulness. “Darling, darling, how could you?” she whispered bitterly as she passed him.

  The briefcase crackled down to some semblance of control. “I’ll give you one last chance, Smith. Not that I think any conceivable defense you might have would be valid, but I hate to demote a Special Emissary, to push him forever out of the Service, without giving him every chance to be heard. So. Is there any defense you wish to have registered before sentence of demotion is passed upon you?”

  Alfred considered. This was evidently a serious business in their eyes, but it was beginning to be slightly meaningless to him. There was too much of it, and it was too complicated. He was tired. And he was Alfred Smith, not John Smith.

  He could tell them about the events of the night, about the Lidsgallians and the information he’d received from the captive Smith. It might be valuable and it might throw a weight in the scales in his favor. The trouble was that then the question of John Smith’s real identity would arise—and that might become very embarrassing.

  Besides, he was over the fear he’d felt earlier about these creatures; they could do little more to him than a dose of sodium bicarbonate, he’d found out. Their super-weapons were to be discounted, at least on Earth. And when it came to that point, he was not at all sure that he wanted to give them helpful information. Who knew just where Earth’s best interests lay?