Invaders From Earth

by Robert Silverberg

  “So that’s it, Ted. It was grand while it lasted, but I knew it couldn’t stay grand much longer, and to spare both of us fifty or sixty years of bitterness, I’ve pulled out. Dave has left the agency, but we have a little money that we’ve both saved. Again, Ted, I’m sorry, sorry for both of us.

  “I left the cat with the Camerons, and you can get him back from them when you get back from Ganymede. Nobody but you and Dave and me knows what’s happened. Take care of yourself, Ted. And so long.”

  He let the tape run down to the end and shut it off. Then he stood numbly in the middle of the room for a long while, and after that he played the tape over once again from the beginning to end.

  Marge. Dave Spalding. And the cat was with the Camerons.

  “I didn’t expect that, Marge,” he said quietly. His throat felt very dry. His eyes ached; but he did not cry at all.

  15

  He poured himself a drink, and even that was not without its painful contingent memories, because Marge had always poured his drinks for him. Then he took off his shoes and listened to the tape a third time, with much the same frame of mind as the man who keeps hitting his head against a brick wall because it feels so good when he stops.

  This time around he was able to stop hearing Marge’s words and listen to the way she was saying them: straightforwardly, with little hesitation or emotional quaver. These were words she had stored within her a long time, he realized, and she seemed almost happy to relieve herself of them.

  No, he thought, he hadn’t expected Marge to do something like this; and that, perhaps, was why she had done it. She was mercurial, unpredictable. He saw now he had never really known her at all.

  Some minutes passed, and the first rough shock ebbed away. He looked at it almost philosophically now. It had been inevitable. She had acted with great strength and wisdom. The Ted Kennedy who had been to Ganymede and had his eyes opened there respected her for it.

  But he felt bitterness at the fact that he had returned from Ganymede a changed man, a man who had not only shifted his stand but who had taken positive action in his new allegiance, and Marge was not here to commend him for having seen her point of view at last. His conversion had come too late for that. There was no point chasing after her, finding her, saying, “Look, Marge, I’ve finally repudiated the Corporation and the agency—won’t you come back now?”

  No. It was too late to wave his new-found allegiance and expect Marge to forgive all his old blunders. Half the unhappiness people make for each other, he thought, is caused by men and women trying to put back together something that should remain forever smashed.

  It hurt, but he forced himself to forget her.

  He rose, crossed the room and snapped on the video. He searched for a newscast and finally found one on Channel Seventy-two, the Bridgeport UHF channel. He listened patiently through the usual guff about the miserable late-July weather, hot and humid despite the best efforts of the Bureau of Weather Adjustment, and to an analysis of the new cabinet crisis in Yugoslavia. Then the newscaster paused, as if turning over a sheet of script, and said, “Spacefield Seven in New Jersey was the scene several hours ago of the arrival from Ganymede of Captain Louis Hills’ space ferry, which had made its last trip to Ganymede three weeks ago laden with supplies for the colony there. Captain Hills reported all well on the tiny world. In an afternoon baseball game, the Red Sox defeated the—”

  Kennedy moved to shut the set off. They had decided to suppress all news of him, then—and they were still rigorously maintaining the fiction that Ganymede was populated by brave men and women from Earth. Well, that was no surprise. There would be an intensive man hunt for him as soon as the Corporation could mobilize its forces. Perhaps it was already under way.

  Kennedy started to form his plans. Today was July 30. The Corporation planned to go before the United Nations and ask for armed intervention on October 11. He had until then to secure evidence that would puncture the fabric of lies he had helped erect.

  But he would have to move warily. The Corporation would be looking for him, anxious to shut him up before he could damage the project. And before long they would have the U.N. Security Police on his trail too, on the hoked-up grounds that he had given arms to the Ganymedeans and murdered Engel. He would have to run, run fast, and hide well. With both Corporation goons and official world police on his trail, he would need to be agile.

  The phone rang. He had no idea who it might be. Marge, maybe. It didn’t matter. If he answered, he might be putting the Corporation on his trail. He forced himself to let it ring, and after a while it stopped. He stared at the chocolate-colored receiver, wondering who might have called.

  Well, it didn’t matter.

  He knew what he had to do: get incriminating data on the Ganymede hoax from the agency files, and turn it over to the U.N. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Probably the instant he set foot in the agency building he’d be grabbed and turned over to the authorities, and from then on he’d never get a chance to speak up.

  Of course, maybe the agency didn’t know about his changed beliefs yet. Perhaps the Corporation had not seen fit to let Gunther’s report get into agency hands yet; maybe Bullard and his cohorts intended to make a full loyalty investigation of the agency they had employed before letting Dinoli know that one of his hand-picked men had turned renegade on Ganymede.

  But he couldn’t take that risk. He would have to get the material out of the agency files by stealth, and somehow get it to a U.N. representative.

  He would have to drop out of sight for a while. There was no hurry about the exposure; he had more than two months. If he hid somewhere for those two months and raided the agency when they least expected it—

  He knew where he could hide. At his brother’s place in Wisconsin.

  Cautiously, he depolarized the windows and peered out of each, one by one, to make sure no one lurked outside. Then he opaqued them all again. He packed a single suitcase, taking with him just one change of clothes and a few toilet articles; this was no time to be burdened by personal property. He left everything else as it was—the bar, the kitchen, the living room with Marge’s picture in it. He hoped the cat would be safe with the Camerons. He had had the cat for many years; he would miss it.

  The phone rang again. He ignored it.

  It stopped eventually. He waited just a moment, gathering his strength, and took a last quick look at the house he and Marge had picked together eight years before, and which he might never see again.

  He was leaving the past behind. Marge, the cat, his bar, his collection of records, his books. All the things he had treasured. The solid, secure life for which he had long been smugly thankful, gone overnight. Ted Kennedy, fugitive. All his thirty-two years had been building toward this, and it seemed strange to him that such a destiny should have been at the end of the string of years that had unrolled for him thus far.

  Good-bye, agency. Good-bye, books and records and drinks and wife, and sleepy old cat and exclusive Connecticut township. Addio. He had few regrets. His brief contact with the Gannys had taught him to put less value on material things than he once had; he was calmer, more purposeful, since learning from them. Which was why he was giving up everything in an attempt to save the Ganymedeans.

  He saw that their culture had to be preserved—and that he alone could save them.

  There was a gun in his night-table drawer, a snub-nosed .38 Marge had made him buy three years before, when a night prowler had terrified the females of the area. He had never used it. Fully loaded, it had rested in the drawer.

  Now he slipped it into its shoulder holster and donned it, scowling in annoyance because he would need to wear a jacket in the July heat to conceal the gun. The weapons permit was somewhere in the drawer; he rummaged for it, found it finally, and slipped it into his suitcase.

  The time was 1632. Kennedy thought a moment: they may be monitoring my phone, so it isn’t safe to phone the airline from here. I’ll go into town to make my reservation
s.

  He opened the front door and cautiously looked around. No one was in sight. Either they hadn’t traced him to his home yet, or they were going to let him run a little before coming down hard.

  He locked the door behind him and went around back to the garage. He put his luggage in the trunk compartment, got into the car, and drove down onto the main road without looking back.

  Ten minutes later he was in town. “Town” consisted of two or three stores, a bank, a post office, a church. It probably had not changed much in the past century; small towns always resist change longer than large cities. Kennedy drove down the county road into the main square and parked near the clock, which was a big old one that had been standing in the center of the town well over a century, and of course still used the twelve-hour system. He glanced up at it, frowning a bit as he computed the time. The hands read 4:45, which he translated back into the more familiar 1645. Less than three hours had passed since his landing at Spacefield Seven.

  It was an hour at which the town was quiet. The afternoon movie show still had ten or fifteen minutes to run; those who weren’t at it were home waiting for dinner.

  Kennedy left his parked car and stepped into Schiller’s, the combined pharmacy-newsstand-luncheonette-department store that served the township. Two or three locals were sipping sodas at the fountain as he came in. Kennedy scooped change from his pocket and found he had no telephone tokens. The phone in Schiller’s did not have an automatic vending machine in the booth, either.

  He put a quarter on the counter and said, “Give me two phone tokens, please.”

  “Sure. Oh, hello there, Mr. Kennedy.” Schiller looked at him speculatively a moment. He was a man in his sixties or seventies, old enough certainly to remember well back into the last century; his eyes were still clear blue, his hair only recently had gone white. He wiped his hands on his stained white smock and said, “Couple of men were in here just a minute ago asking for you. Wanted to know which road to take to get out to your place, so I had my boy show them. Must have been friends of yours.”

  “I’m not expecting any,” Kennedy said. He took the tokens from the counter.

  “Hey, there they are!” Schiller exclaimed, pointing.

  Through the plate-glass front window, Kennedy saw two men in dark brown business suits and austere violet traveling cloaks coming out of the bank. They were grim, efficient-looking men. Corporation men, Kennedy thought. He started to walk quickly toward the telephone booths in the rear of the store.

  “Hey, Mr. Kennedy,” Schiller called. “You better go out there and see those fellers before they get into their car and go chasin’ all the way out to your place.”

  “I don’t have time to see them. I’ve got to get into the city on some important business.”

  “You want me to go out there and tell ’em that?” Schiller asked helpfully.

  “No—that’ll only offend them. Let them make an appointment with me next time they want to see me at home.” He ducked into the telephone booth in time to cut off one of Schiller’s stale monologues on the ways of the new generation, and how they charged around so fast they never had time to talk to each other.

  Kennedy asked for Information, got the number of the ticket deck at Roosevelt Airport, and was told that the next flight for Milwaukee was departing at 1951 that evening, arrival time in Milwaukee 2113 Milwaukee time. That sounded fine to Kennedy.

  “Make a reservation for one,” he said. “The name is Engel.” He gave the name almost unthinkingly, automatically.

  “First name, please?” came the impersonal reply.

  “Ah—Victor. Victor Engel.”

  “Thank you, sir. Would you please pick up your reservation no later than an hour before departure time?”

  “I’ll do that,” Kennedy said. He hung up, listened to his token click down into the depths of the phone, and left the booth.

  Schiller said, “Just like I told you, Mr. Kennedy. Those friends of yours drove off toward your place while you were on the phone. Guess they’re going to waste some time now.”

  “I guess so,” Kennedy said. He grinned. “I just didn’t have time to see them, though. I have to get down to the city in a hurry. My boat leaves at 1900.”

  “Boat?”

  Kennedy nodded. “I’m going to Europe for a month on company business. Don’t tell a soul, of course. I really don’t want it getting around or all my friends will expect me to bring back souvenirs.”

  He waved genially and left. As he drove rapidly down the Thruway toward New York, he thought about Schiller and the two bleak-faced Corporation men. They were certain to come back to town once they found his house empty; perhaps they would stop in at Schiller’s again, and in that case they were certain to get drawn into conversation with the old man.

  He hoped they had a nice time looking for him on the departing boats to Europe.

  16

  He drove down into New York City; cutting left on the Thruway and taking the artery that led out. along the south shore of Long Island Sound to the big new airport. Roosevelt Airport was a city in itself, practically; its rambling acres covered a great chunk of Long Island. It served as the airline capital of the world.

  Kennedy reached the parking area at 1747 and turned his car over to the attendant.

  “Want her shined up, sir? Refueled, overhauled?”

  Kennedy shook his head. “Sorry, thanks.”

  “Those deflectors look like they could use—”

  “No,” Kennedy said. He took the parking ticket, which had the time stamped on it, and folded it away in his wallet. The attendant was going to be surprised when no one ever showed up to claim the dented ’42 Frontenac.

  He made his way toward the shining plastic building that housed the central ticket offices and got on a line that moved slowly toward a window labelled Reservations For Today’s Flights.

  When he reached the window he gave his name: “Victor Engel. I’m going to Milwaukee.”

  “Of course, Mr. Engel.” The girl performed three quick motions with her hands and slid a crisp white folder under the grill toward him.

  “One hundred thirteen fifty,” she said.

  Kennedy took two bills from his wallet, passed them over and received his change. Normally he would have paid by check—but the reservation was in Engel’s name, and he would have had to sign the check that way. There would have been immediate catastrophe. It was impossible to pass a bad check when the lightning-fast receptors of the Central Clearing House in Chicago could check his signature against their files and report back within fifteen seconds.

  It was too bad he had to buy round-trip tickets, too. The return half would expire in thirty days, and he had no intention of returning East so soon. But a one-way trip might arouse suspicion, and he wanted to keep Victor Engel as free of suspicion as possible.

  Victor Engel. The first name had been a sudden guess. It had been a curious moment when he realized he had never known the dead linguist’s first name.

  He moved out of the ticket deck onto the promenade. In the distance, outlined against the setting sun, a huge plane was coming in—one of the FB-11 stratoliners, the five-hunded-passenger jet jobs that crossed the country from New York to California in just under two hours. He watched it taxi in, like a great bird returning to its nest.

  He ate alone in an automatic restaurant—a light meal, protoid sandwich and milk, for he was far from hungry just now—and bought an evening ’fax-sheet at a vending stand. Quickly, he made his way past the West Coast baseball scores, past the usual item on the weather, past the latest on the Yugoslavian ministerial shake-up. He found a squib on the return of the Ganymede ship. There was no mention of the public relations man who had fled the spacefield hotly pursued by Corporation mobsters.

  He crumpled the ’fax-sheet and dumped it in a dispos-all. Finding himself outside a bookstore, he went in, browsed for half an hour, and emerged with a couple of paperbacks.

  He strolled the promenade as the heat of
the day died away, waiting for departure time. At 1925 the announcement came, “Universal Airlines plane for Milwaukee, Flight 165, now loading passengers at Gate 17.”

  The ship was not the newest model—an FB-9, seating ninety, a fairly low-ceiling liner that never went higher than 20,000 feet on passenger flights. As he boarded it, the stewardess, a shy-looking, rosy-cheeked blonde, smiled and said, “Good evening, Mr. Engel. I hope you have a pleasant flight.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and found a seat in the front, to the fore of the wings.

  After spaceflight, airplane flying seemed odd to Kennedy—oddly clumsy and oddly unsafe. The plane took off on schedule, roaring down the runway and veering sharply upward into the sky; he looked down at the darkening streets of Brooklyn and saw tiny dots that were autos passing below, and then Brooklyn passed out of sight as the ship stabilized at its flight altitude of 20,000 feet.

  At that height they were well above the clouds, which formed a solid gray-white floor stretching to the horizon, billowing up here and there in puffs that looked like ice floes on a frozen sea. There was little sensation of vibration or of motion, but at no time was Kennedy deceived into believing that the plane was not moving, as so often he had felt aboard the spaceship.

  He read for a while, but lost interest quickly and dozed off. Sooner than he expected, they were in Milwaukee; his watch read 2213, but he jabbed the setting stud to put the hands back an hour, to conform with local time.

  The Milwaukee airport probably had been a local wonder a century before; now, it merely looked cheap and shabby, a weathered old edifice of green glass and plastic. Kennedy treated himself to a cup of synthetic caffeine drink in one of the airport restaurants, and considered his next several steps.