by Matt
"Where we had no worldwide organization before, we've now got one," he said. "For example, remember how I could only call to London for you a handful of people from some of the larger European cities, when you wanted to show them the clock trick? But now we've people everywhere—and nearly all of them used to acting under orders. Don't you see what that means?"
"I can see it means easier access to help for me in more places," said Shane. "But I'm still going to have to—"
"But you're not," said Peter. "For example, we can now have the Pilgrim appear at the same time in two different places—or have him appear only minutes apart, as if he had split-second transportation to any point on the globe—"
"Hold on," said Shane. "There's only one individual who can do what I can do—so far at least."
"Actually, yes," said Peter. "But these people have resources—all the arts of the stage magician and more. They can produce people to play Pilgrim who seem to appear out of thin air, who seem to be able to float down through the air, and so on. When a real miracle is needed, if it really ever is, then you can come out and baffle the experts."
Shane looked at him, suddenly thoughtful.
"Why do you say 'if it ever is'?" he asked.
"Why, because you're too valuable to risk unless it's absolutely necessary; and there's no need to now, except in unforeseen circumstances. All the general run of people really wanted was a legendary figure to believe in, and you've already given them that. Even if you disappeared off the face of the Earth, tomorrow, most of the world's population would still cherish and keep spreading the story of the Pilgrim who could make Aalaags back off."
"In other words I'm not necessary from here on out?" said Shane softly.
"I didn't say anything like that!" answered Peter swiftly. "The mere fact all these groups exist doesn't get rid of the Aalaag or give us any new weapon to get rid of them with. The only real hope so far is the one you held out to the local Resistance leaders in London—confront the aliens with a planetful of people who're no use to them and get them to leave. We need you to get that message across to them, no matter how the message is put. We need to know that the aliens will understand. And you're our knowledgeable, articulate body on that. Of course, you'll have to work with this new organization, if you want it to work with you; and there's already been some good suggestions made by these professional people—"
"Wait a minute," said Shane, still quietly. "What new organization?"
"But I told you!"
"No."
"Well, it's very simple," said Peter. "I told you the military antialien units of one nation's military or police, or whatever, knew their opposite numbers in the other nations. In effect, even before you came along, there were actually three large networks of antialien professionals already existing. One was essentially that of the Western world, one of the Soviet, and one primarily Oriental."
"The Third World was rather overlooked, wasn't it?" said Shane.
"Not at all. Most of the so-called Third World countries were connected with one of the big three networks I mentioned—sometimes with all three of them. Of course, there were also internal differences—the Chinese and the Japanese outfits never did warm up to each other as much as others thought they might. At any rate, the point is all it took was for the three networks to combine; which, effectively, they've now done. There's a sort of quasi-temporary—call it whatever you want—directorate for the whole thing already operating; and it's already come up with some ideas about what the Pilgrim ought to do next—"
"That's what I thought," said Shane.
Peter stared at him, the glass in his right hand held suspended in midair.
"Pardon me?" said Peter.
"I said, that's what I thought," repeated Shane. "You can leave now. Go back to London, get in touch with this directorate you talk about, and tell them that they can run off and play at anything they feel like; but as far as the Pilgrim is concerned, they don't exist."
Peter stared at him. Slowly, the Englishman lowered his glass and set it carefully upon the coffee table in front of him.
"In God's name, why?"
"Because I'm not interested in their ideas about what the Pilgrim should do. Because I know that any idea they come up with is bound to be wrong."
Peter still stared at him.
"How can you say that," Peter asked, "when you don't even know what those ideas are?"
"For the same reason I knew none of you Resistance people realized what you were up against in the Aalaag. These people don't either. And because they don't, they're guessing. I don't guess—I know. And one of the things I know is that they're bound to guess wrong because they don't know. I'm not going to risk everything I know I can do because of the blundering of people who don't."
Peter stared at him.
"You need them," said Peter flatly, at last. "What's more, they can find out who you really are if they really want to, by running down and questioning those Milanese Resistance people who saw you when you were kidnapped, then using that information through their own police or military contacts with the Aalaag to find you by a process of elimination. Even if that didn't work, they'd find you when they started to track down Maria. They're not like us—they can pull the strings of governmental machinery, right up to the alien level, to get what they want. Then, once they find you, they'll give you a simple choice. Follow orders from them or they'll betray you to the aliens. They'll know how to do that, safely, too."
Shane sat still, with the expressionlessness he had learned in more than two years within the House of Weapons; but inside him there was a shakiness—a shakiness made up of fear and rage. Fear of what ignorance could do to him and his plans, rage at the stupidity of humans who could still think simple answers would work with the Aalaag. Somehow, he told himself, he must come up with some kind of response to what Peter was saying, a response that would also convince this organization the other man talked about. Think! The command to himself burned in his brain.
"They can try to trace me," he said slowly, "and identify me; though if I catch any of them at it, I'll betray them to the Aalaag. I know how to do something like that safely—they don't. If they betray me, I'll tell the Aalaag all about the fact they exist—and that's all the Aalaag will need to know to find and destroy them. And I'm not just making a blackmail threat, I'm stating a fact. It's a logical development that'll follow inevitably if they betray me. If the Aalaag distrust me, the first thing they'll do is question me—and I'm not someone who'll stand up under torture."
He stopped, telling himself to calm down. He went on more soberly.
"Besides, even if I had reason to, and even if I could stand up to questioning by the Interior Guard at their orders, it wouldn't matter. The Aalaag have more sophisticated ways of getting at everything I've ever known, if they have to use them. The day I come under suspicion from the Aalaag, everyone in those organizations—and the Resistance, as far as I've come to know the people in it—are as good as dead, headed down the same route I'll already be following. The only choice this network, or organization—or whatever you call it—has, is to sit back, leave me alone and be left out of what I'm going to do; or accept the fact they're the ones who've got to take orders—blindly, and from me. Go tell them that."
The silence when he stopped speaking was almost cruel. Peter finally broke it.
"Christ!" he muttered, staring not so much at Shane as through him. "Christ..."
He stirred and his eyes came back to focus on Shane.
"All right," he said heavily. "I'll tell them. You've got us all by the balls—"
The harsh ringing of the phone interrupted him. Maria, who was closest to the instrument, reached out and lifted its handpiece off its hooks.
"Hello?" she said, and her face paled as she listened. She put her hand over the mouthpiece.
"Shane," she said to him. "It's a man's voice asking for Shane Evert. Shane, we've never mentioned your name in this hotel—"
"I'll take it,"
he said, picked the handpiece out of her grip and spoke into it. "This is Shane Evert."
—And Lyt Ahn was suddenly in the midst of them, standing, towering between rug and ceiling with barely inches to spare. His face was turned in Shane's direction.
"Shane-beast," he said in Aalaag. "You will conclude your duties in Milan within three more days. You and your assistant will proceed then, in that order, to Cairo, Moscow, Calcutta, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and New York, where new Government Units are being set up. You will observe each one in that order, calling in a report to me here after each one, then return to me here."
He vanished.
Peter and Maria were sitting absolutely motionless in their seats, staring at where the First Captain had stood.
"It's all right," said Shane to them. "That's only a recorded message—a projection of him. He simply spoke the order to me in his office back in the House of Weapons, it was automatically recorded and human servants traced me and set up a link through the phone system."
The other two looked at him with nothing to say.
"So," said Shane, "it turns out neither this organization of yours nor I make the decision what I do next. The First Captain has spoken."
19
That night the bad dreams began.
Shane woke to find himself tightly wound in Maria's arms, his pajamas soaked, his face wet—and a devastating, ugly feeling, as of something unbearable just experienced, filling him.
"What is it?" he gasped.
"You're awake!" said Maria. "You're awake now?"
"Yes... I think so." The inner feeling began to recede a little from him. "What happened? What was it?"
"You were dreaming. You were saying something I couldn't make out and crying...." She wiped the damp skin under his eyes and at their corners with soft fingertips.
"Crying..." he echoed dully. He had no idea of what the dream had been. He tried to recover it, but it was as if it hid from him. "You say you couldn't make out what I was saying. Was it in Aalaag?"
"I don't—" She hesitated. "I don't think so."
"Not in Aalaag," he muttered, blocked and baffled.
"It was in English, maybe," she said. "But you were talking so thickly I couldn't understand you. You didn't really say the words out loud."
The escaped memory of whatever he had lived through in the nightmare was fading fast now, although it still hung about him like an invisible aura in the lightless bedroom. He put his arms around Maria and pulled her close to him, burying his face in her hair and deliberately shutting his mind to everything but her presence. Peace moved in; and he slept again.
In the morning he woke with his mind clearer than it had been the night before. The hotel they were in had claimed it was full, with no more rooms available; and Shane had not wanted to draw undue attention to himself in the establishment by trying bribery. Peter had accordingly spent the night on the same couch in the parlor on which he had sat with Shane the evening before. They ordered breakfast up to the room and Shane talked to the Briton as they ate.
"I've had a chance to sleep on it—and it's a good thing," he told Peter across the breakfast table. "I forgot that you're the one who's got to do the convincing of this group drawn from the organizations, the people who had ideas for what I ought to do. I don't want even to meet with these people. Make them see that's for their protection as much as mine. Anyone I meet is certain to land in the hands of the Aalaag if the Aalaag ever start suspecting me."
"Hmm," said Peter. Shane thought he saw a glimpse of that ambition in the other man he had suspected earlier. "You want to pass on all your orders through me?"
"That's right."
"I think I can make them see the sense of that," said Peter. "It's the idea of taking orders from you instead of giving you suggestions that I'm going to have trouble selling them."
"Lay it on the line," said Shane. "What I said last night still holds. They can come in under my orders or stand aside. If they get in my way, they'll deliver themselves into the Aalaag's hands."
"But to make them believe it—," Peter began.
"You had a good example last night of why they've got no choice but to believe it," answered Shane. "You saw for yourself. They can't run me because I can't run myself. Lyt Ahn pulls the strings on me; and he pulls them without warning, and for reasons they can't guess and neither can I or anyone else—even other Aalaag. In short, their plans aren't only ill-advised, they wouldn't be possible from the moment they're made, if only because of the fact I belong to the First Captain."
Peter nodded, spreading honey on a piece of roll.
"In any case," Shane went on, "you heard him give me his orders last night. My time here is limited now; and there's something I have to do which is going to take me out of sight for a day, possibly two—"
He paused to look at Maria.
"I won't be in touch even with you," he said.
"It's something dangerous, isn't it?" asked Maria quiedy.
He looked at her for a moment, then nodded.
"I knew it was coming," she said. "Don't worry. I'll do whatever you say. You want me just to stay in the suite until you get back?"
"It'd be best if you didn't go out at all," said Shane. He turned back to Peter. "I'd like you to stay with her, until I get back. If any going out is necessary, you can do it. Once I'm back, you can head back to London as fast as you can and contact this organization. Tell them if they want to work with me, something I need immediately is a phone number in Cairo, Egypt, and someone there I can call on for any help I need. Don't tell them anything about Lyt Ahn's orders. Let them guess if they like, but tell them as little as possible. If they complain, repeat that it's for their own safety as well as mine—though they ought to be able to figure that much out for themselves."
"Do you want me to give them any idea of the kind of help you're likely to want in Cairo?" Peter asked.
"No."
"Ah."
"Now," said Shane, pushing his chair back from the table and standing up. "It's after nine o'clock. I didn't plan to sleep this late. I'm headed toward the Unit; and I'll see the two of you again in forty-eight hours or less—if I'm lucky."
He got to the Unit at a little before ten minutes to ten hundred hours in the morning. With Lyt Ahn's orders about his leaving in three days, there could be no waiting around for the safer, end-of-the-day period to raid the arms locker. He would have to take the more dangerous moment in midmorn-ing, which was now only some twenty-five minutes away; and if he was caught in the basement area, there would be no excuses he could give for being there, except the weak ones that he had either lost his way in searching for a particular office, or that it was part of his duty to Lyt Ahn to report back that he had observed every part of the premises. Both were bad, because the natural thing in either case would have been for him to first contact the offices of the Interior Guard for a guide.
It was tempting simply to pass up the arms locker visit entirely. But there was too much danger he might be unable to get into Aalaag Headquarters in Rome, when he got there.
So he went to his own office, waited out the slow crawl of the minutes until the time of ten-fifteen, then went out into the empty corridor and quietly descended the back stairs of the building to the basement. Here, as in London and elsewhere, the layout was essentially the same. As in London, the door to the locker dissolved immediately at the touch of the key of Lyt Ahn.
He helped himself to another of the invisibility instruments. This time, also, he hunted for tools like that he had seen used by the Maintenance woman to cut the doorway in the wall of the House of Weapons. He had carefully taken note then of what the instrument looked like; but even with that image in his mind, it took him an uncomfortably long time to find one here.
However, he finally managed, and left the arms locker with the door once more fastened behind him. He slipped upstairs again to his office, drawing a deep breath of relief once he was above the basement level and could give a satisfying
answer to anyone who questioned his presence—not that on the ground floor anyone would have a reason to question him. He returned to his office, waited until the noon lunch hour filled the corridors with human servants, then boldly mingled with them and signed out in ordinary fashion.
Outside, he refused a couple of invitations to join some of the others for lunch. Even if time had not been a factor, he would have still done so—their curiosity about him was to be expected and normal, but dangerous. Better to be known as unsocial than to have something known that you later wished was unknown.
He walked far enough off to lose any visible co-workers and took a cab back to the hotel. There, he put on his pilgrim robe, took his staff, then caught a taxi to the office of Marrotta.
Marrotta himself, he discovered when he got there, was out to lunch—and he had left no orders for people to do anything for Shane in the business owner's absence. And no, the two men at work in the office had no idea where Marrotta might be eating.
Shane produced and displayed a large wad of lire. Both the workers in the office were shocked and insulted. Shane went out, walked down the front of the building far enough to be out of sight of the office windows and leaned against its wall, waiting. After only a few minutes, the younger of the office workers appeared around the corner of the truck gate farther down the street, and came rapidly up the sidewalk to Shane.