Way of the Pilgrim

by Matt

  "I'm on special duty for the First Captain," said Shane, showing his credentials as a courier-translator. "I'll need to get out of here without being seen. Have you got some kind of a closed car or truck just about to leave I could ride in, out of sight?"

  The M. and S. Head considered him for a moment.

  "We've got a load of dirty laundry going out in a van," he said. "You can ride with that. Where you want to go to? I can tell the driver."

  "Just have him drop me where I ask him to," said Shane.

  "Fine. You come along with me, now."

  "This'll do," said Shane to the driver of the laundry van some ten minutes later. The van stopped, he got out, and watched it out of sight. Then he walked two blocks and hailed the first open taxi that came along.

  "Sheldon Arms Hotel," he said to its driver. "Do you know where that is?"

  "I know it," said the driver, putting his cab in movement. The hotel, in fact, was less than five minutes away.

  "Wait for me," said Shane, giving the driver a couple of ten-pound notes. "I've got to register, but as soon as I do that I've got an errand to run, then back here again."

  "Right." The tone of the driver's voice had become a good deal more friendly with the appearance of the ten-pound notes. Shane went inside.

  "Shane Evert," said Shane to the desk clerk. The amount of money he slid unobtrusively across the desk to the clerk was considerably more than he had given the taxi driver. "I don't have a reservation, but I've been here once before. I'm particularly fond of Room 221. Do you suppose I could have that again?"

  The clerk glanced at the money on the desk. Shane added another bill.

  "I think that could be arranged, sir," said the clerk, sweeping up the money with a gesture that suggested he was brushing some small untidiness off the desktop. "It'll take a few minutes, perhaps twenty minutes...."

  "Good," said Shane, turning away. "I've got to go out for a bit anyway. I'll register now, but bring my luggage back when I come again."

  "Of course, sir."

  Shane signed the registration book and returned to the waiting cab.

  "There's something I need to buy," he told the driver. They sought out a shop selling secondhand clothing. "I need a two-color pilgrim's robe," Shane told the small, middle-aged man behind the counter at the store. "Blue on one side, brown on the other." He opened his hand over the countertop and this time it was a pair of gold oblongs he laid down, the currency in which the Corps members and those of a few others were paid by the Aalaag. He saw the eyes of the little man fasten on them.

  "I'll have to take them into the back room to make change," he said to Shane.

  "Of course," said Shane.

  Such gold tabs saw their way into ordinary human monetary channels only through the hands of those who worked for the aliens or those who dealt in the black market that sold special luxuries to those who so worked. The word of his purchase would reach local Resistance headquarters quickly.

  The small man disappeared through a door behind the counter. He was gone perhaps four or five minutes, to return with a robe fitting Shane's description and a handful of notes and coins.

  "Will that do, sir?" he said, putting this all on the counter in front of Shane.

  "Perfectly," said Shane. "Wrap the robe for me, will you? Could you deliver it to Room 221 at the Sheldon Arms Hotel this afternoon for me?"

  "It'd be a pleasure, sir."

  Shane left the shop and regained the taxi.

  "Back to the Sheldon Arms," he told the driver. In his room at the hotel, which showed some sign of having been hastily cleared of a previous occupant, Shane ordered up a meal, ate, and then lay on the bed, thinking and waiting.

  It was only a little over two hours before there was a knock at the door of his room.

  "Delivery for you, sir," said a voice beyond the door.

  He was on his feet instantly and as silently as he was able to move. He stepped across to the darkest corner of the room and stood mere with his back to the window. He pulled up his pilgrim's hood over his head, drawing the sides of the hood in, so that his face was hidden in deep shadow. He said nothing.

  He had expected at least one more knock at the door, but there was a sudden splintering crash as the lock gave and two very large men erupted into the room. They stared at the empty bed and around them, for a moment plainly not identifying him as a human figure in his stillness and the shadow of the corner. In that moment a third man moved into the room from behind them. It was the man called Peter who spoke Italian with an English accent and who had been in charge of the group that had kidnapped Shane in Milan.

  "I thought this was your home ground," Shane said to him.

  At the sound of Shane's voice they saw him. Before they could move, he went on. "I am the Pilgrim. I'll talk to you, Peter, and you only. Get the others out."

  There was a moment in which it seemed anything might happen. The two large men glanced back at Peter.

  "All right," said Peter, after a moment's hesitation. "Outside, both of you, and put the door back in place. But wait right outside it, there."

  He looked directly at Shane.

  "But what you've got to say better be worthwhile," he added.

  "It is," said Shane. "I'm going to help you. I know the Aalaag and what their weaknesses are. I can tell you how to fight them." Having said this much, the rest came easily to his lips. "I may even be able to tell you how to get rid of them altogether. But you're the only one who ought to hear what I've got to say, or know who I am."

  Peter stared at him for a long, blank-faced moment. Then he turned to the two men, who were lifting the door back into place in its opening.

  "On second thought, wait down the hall," he said. "That's an order."

  He turned back and smiled at Shane. It was a smile of pure relief.

  "It's good to have you with us," he said. "You don't know how good it is."

  8

  There were fourteen of them, gathered in the small room of an empty warehouse about a table made of two smaller tables pushed together.

  They were the greater London area Resistance leaders, according to what the man Shane knew only as Peter had claimed. Privately, Shane had doubts about that. Peter himself was obviously in command here, as he had been the obvious dominant figure—even though he did not appear to be the local leader—of the group in Milan, Italy that had kidnapped Shane after he had rescued Maria from the Aalaag. Maria— whom he somehow hoped to save from exactly this sort of thing—wasn't there.

  The light in this room came not from electricity provided by a bicycle generator, but from kerosene lamps, spaced on a long metal worktable, lamps whose mantles hissed and glowed whitely inside their glass chimneys. The illumination they gave seemed hardly less than the same number of hundred watt electric bulbs would have given, and Shane drew the edges of the cowl to his cloak close together before his face.

  The rest, even Peter, were already seated in chairs at the table. Shane remained the only one standing in the room. He had never done this sort of thing before in his life and he was hollow within at the moment with the empty sense of isolation that had been with him as long as he had been aware of other people.

  "It's up to you to convince them," Peter had said while driving them both to this meeting.

  But this sort of confrontation was not what he was good at. He knew so, instinctively. His way had always been to avoid crowds and gatherings. He was a loner; and while he could be effective in conversation or even argument, one on one, he had never had the desire to address a number of people at once. It was ironic, to be in this position, given his instinct always to avoid groups and organizations. Events had seemed to contrive to draw him away from that instinct ever since the moment he had drawn the figure of the Pilgrim on the wall in Aalborg.

  His only hope now, he thought, looking at their faces, was to be himself, let the words in him come as they would, and not try to hide his sense of being different. He could never be one of them, so
there was no point in trying. It had never worked all through the years of his boyhood and his school days; and it would not work now. Perhaps at least some of them, too, would know what it was to be different and apart from the general mass of people everywhere.

  "... We're perfectly safe here," Peter was saying, speaking from his own chair at the far end of the makeshift conference table, looking down its long length at Shane, who stood at the other end. "You can take off that hood now, and let the rest of them here have a look at you. And sit down."

  "No," said Shane.

  The negative had been reflexive—almost instinctive in its protectiveness. But the moment it left his lips he had no doubt about why he had said it.

  He saw them all staring at him.

  "If I could find some way of doing it," he said, speaking specifically and directly to Peter as he remained standing, "I'd erase what I look like from your memory, too. I know the Aalaag better than any of you ever will. You can either believe that or not—that's up to you. If you believe it, you'll realize you've got everything to gain by dealing with me; but I've got everything to lose if one of you ends up being able to identify me, later on. So you'll deal with me with my face hidden, or not at all."

  "What is it we're going to do together, then?" asked Peter. "That's what we're all waiting to hear."

  Seated at the far end of the table, Peter looked an unlikely person to hold authority over these others around him, some of whom had reached into the second half of life's century and many of whom looked more like leaders than he did. He was boyishly round-faced and round-skulled, with his short, straight blond hair on top of the skull. His appearance was that of a man in no more than his early twenties, but he must be older than that to have the authority he appeared to have over these people and those Shane had seen him with in Milan.

  "I'm going to give you a plan for getting rid of the Aalaag," Shane answered. "The same thing you and others like you have been trying to do ever since the aliens landed, but without succeeding in anything much more than sitting around and talking about it, or marking on walls—"

  There was a murmur that was half a growl from those around the table. Their faces were not friendly.

  "Like it or not, it's a fact," Shane said. "I repeat, I know the Aalaag. With my help you've got some hope. Without me, you've got no more than you ever had—and that's nothing at all. Your attitude here isn't encouraging. I did a lot of thinking before I decided to get back in touch with you people."

  He paused. None of them said anything.

  "I want you to be completely clear about this," he said. "I can help you—but I'm putting my own life on the line to do it. I know. The rest of you are all doing that, too. But you've made your choice. For me to work with you means my taking chances none of you have to take; and whether I do that depends on you. It depends, in fact, on whether we can agree to work together on my terms."

  He paused again.

  "You could be a spy for the aliens," said a man in his forties with a heavy jaw, halfway down the table to Shane's left. Shane laughed; and he did not have to exaggerate the bitterness of that laughter. It came up like an acid bubble from his stomach into his throat.

  "Now, there's a perfect example of why you've never succeeded in doing anything large against the Aalaag by yourselves, and never will," he said. "That's exactly the attitude that leaves you helpless where they're concerned. You can't help thinking of yourself as equal to them, with the only difference between you and them the fact that they've got a massive edge in technology over anything we humans ever came up with. You think of them basically as equals under their armor and without their weapons—"

  "Well, aren't they?" interrupted the man with the heavy jaw. "Those things; and a little more height and some extra muscle. That's all the difference; and they act like they're gods and we're dirt!"

  "Maybe." Shane shook his head. "The point isn't," he said, "whether you're actually their equals or not, but that you think you are. As a result, you take it for granted they think of you the same way; which is so far from their way of thinking that they'd have trouble believing you could imagine something like that."

  He paused. Was he getting through to them at all? He went on.

  'To you," he said, "it might make sense to send a spy among troublemakers of a subjugated race. To them... would you send a laboratory mouse to spy upon other mice? Can a mouse be a spy? And if it could, what could it report back to you, other than that others of its own kind were there in the walls—and you knew that already. Sooner or later, with poison and traps, you'll get rid of them anyway; so why this nonsense of sending a beast just like them to 'spy' on them?"

  Shane stopped speaking. The others around the table stared back at him and said nothing for a long moment. Then Peter spoke.

  "My apologies, fellow Resistance fighters," he said. "I brought you here to meet this man who calls himself Pilgrim because I thought he could be useful to our own efforts. I still think so. Very useful. But I had no idea he'd start out by insulting us. In fact, I don't see the reason and the sense of his doing it, even now. Why, Pilgrim?"

  "Because there's no use in our talking unless I can get through to you on a level where your minds have been closed from the start," Shane answered. "You've got to face some facts and get rid of some illusions; and the first of those is the dream that someday you're going to be able to fight them and beat them. Get it into your heads that if there was only one Aalaag on Earth, short of surrounding him or her with a wall of living human flesh renewed as fast as the alien killed those who made it up, you couldn't even contain him, let alone conquer him."

  "Even if there was only one, it'd be worth doing," shouted a small man with a face like a dried apple, farther down the table than the heavy-jawed man.

  "That's right," said a thick-bodied, thick-faced woman.

  "He'd have to run out of power for his weapons sooner or later."

  "Do you know he'd run out—or do you just assume that?" retoited Shane. "You see? That's a human-type assumption. I've lived with the Aalaag for over two years and I'll tell you I wouldn't take it for granted that he'd run out of anything. No, in fact, what I'd assume would be that his power would last beyond the point where the last person on Earth was dead."

  "What are you trying to tell us then?" said the heavy-jawed man. "That we can't win?"

  "Not in any face-to-face, stand-up fight with them, no. Never," said Shane. "You can never destroy the Aalaag. But, what you might be able to do is trick them into leaving this planet and going someplace else."

  "Go someplace else? Go where?" The female voice came from close to Shane on his right, and by the time he had pulled his gaze back from the heavy-jawed man, there was no way he could tell which of the three women seated close to him on that side of the table had spoken.

  "Who knows?" Shane said. "Somewhere where they'd find another race to subjugate, one more profitable to own than we .are."

  The heavy-jawed man snorted and leaned back in his chair, tilting it on its two back legs.

  "Just ask them to go away, I suppose?" he said.

  "No," said Shane. "A lot more than that. There'll be a lot more to do to get that done, and work a lot more difficult and a lot more painful than that."

  He paused and looked down the table at each in turn.

  "Tell me this, then," he said slowly. "You've been ready to give your lives to fight the Aalaag if some kind of workable plan could be made. Are you still ready to do that?"

  There was silence, but the expressions on the faces were answer enough.

  "All right," Shane said. "Now I come along. All I have to offer is something that might not work. But it also might work—which is more than you or anyone you know has been able to come up with in two and a half years or more. And I tell you that to get a chance to use it you have to take me as I am—without questions about myself—and believe what I tell you about the Aalaag. Isn't it worth your accepting that for the chance—even just the chance—of doing what
you've been trying to do so long without success?"

  Silence, then the voice of the heavy-jawed man.

  "You've got to give us some reason to go along with you."

  "All right," said Shane. "I'll say this much. You haven't been able to fight the Aalaag on your own. But if you listen to me I think I can show you how to make them fight themselves, by taking advantage of the way they really are, and what they really think."

  No one said anything.

  "Well?" asked Shane after a moment. "Does that give you reason enough to try to believe what I'll tell you?"

  Peter also said nothing, at the far end of the table. He only sat, a little sideways in his chair as if his legs wire crossed to one side, just clear of the overhang. He seemed, not so much to be smiling, as to be about to smile.