Invaders From Earth

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Invaders From Earth Page 13

by Robert Silverberg


  It was an hour’s drive from Milwaukee to Brockhurst, where he had been born and where his older brother still lived. But it was late, and he felt hesitant about barging in on them unannounced when he knew he could not get out there much before midnight. Steve had always been a man of regular habits, and though he probably wouldn’t say anything if his brother arrived unexpectedly near midnight, it would upset his routine.

  Instead of going out there, Kennedy took a cab to town and rented a room in the first hotel he found. In the morning he dialed his brother’s number as soon as he was up, at 0800. Steve would be having breakfast about that time, before going out on the day’s run.

  He was right. A gruff deep voice said, “Kennedy speaking. Who’s this?”

  “Kennedy, this is Kennedy. Of the Connecticut Kennedys, you know.”

  A moment of silence. Then: “Ted?”

  “None other.”

  Hesitantly: “What—what’s on your mind?”

  “I thought I’d come visit you,” Kennedy said. “I got into Milwaukee last night, too late to call.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  That wasn’t like his brother at all; Steve normally would have been effusively cordial. Now he sounded worried and tense.

  “Look, Steve, I’ll take the next bus out to your place. I’m here alone, and I can’t explain everything over the phone. Can you wait till I get there? I’ll—”

  “No,” Steve said bluntly. “Stay in Milwaukee. I’ll come see you. Where are you?”

  “Hotel Avon. But—”

  “You stay there. I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Puzzled, Kennedy hung up. He didn’t understand. Steve always had an invitation ready for him. But now, when he needed him, Steve seemed unwilling.

  Maybe, he thought, Steve was getting even. He knew he had neglected Steve for a long time, and maybe now Steve resented it. But the only thing he and Steve had ever had in common was a set of parents.

  Steve was eleven years his senior, and, since their father had died when Ted was seven, had served as head of the family. Steve was the salt-of-the-earth type, the hearty middle-western sort, big-bodied and smiling, with a fondness for beer and fishing excursions. He was a faithful churchgoer. He had quarreled endlessly with his brother, until Ted, more nervous by temperament, introverted and intellectual, had left home after high school, gone to Chicago and enrolled in Northwestern.

  The brothers had met just once since Kennedy’s marriage to Marge—in 2039, when a vacation trip of Steve’s had brought him East. It had been an awkward meeting; Steve and his plump wife Betty had been ill at ease in the modern surroundings of the Kennedy home. The music he played for them had bored them, the books had awed them, and once Betty had hit a raw nerve by asking Marge when she expected to start raising a family. Betty had had two children already, with a third on the way. Marge had blushed and tried to explain that it wasn’t because they didn’t want children that they didn’t have any. Since that time, Kennedy had exchanged letters with his brother sporadically, but as the years passed they had had less and less to say to each other. It was nearly ten months since he had last written to Steve.

  Now he waited, pacing tensely around the confines of the shabby Milwaukee hotel room. Shortly after 0900, Steve arrived.

  He had grown gray, Kennedy noticed, but he still looked impressive, a big-muscled, thick-bodied man with deep, sad eyes that belied the essentially untroubled mind behind them. He squeezed Kennedy’s right hand mercilessly. Next to his brother, Kennedy felt suddenly shamefaced; he was Easternized, high-strung, overintellectual, and probably looked a woeful figure to his healthy, happy brother.

  “I want to apologize,” Steve said huskily. “I couldn’t let you come out to the house.”

  “Why not?”

  Steve flicked his eyes uncertainly around the room. “Are you in some kind of trouble, Ted?”

  “Not really.”

  “I can always tell when you lie to me. You just lied. Ted, I was always afraid you’d get mixed up in something bad. I tried to teach you to do your day’s work and leave well enough alone, but I guess it never really took, or else the people down East taught you different. What did you do, Ted?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Kennedy lied. “I just want to stay at the house, quietly, for a while.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  Coming from Steve, that was flatly incredible. “Why?”

  Steve sighed. “I got a call last night from the local Security people. They wanted to know if I was your brother. I said yes. They said you were in big trouble back East, and you were wanted by Security. They wouldn’t tell me what for. Then they said I’d have to cooperate or I’d be subject to arrest as an accessory after the fact.”

  Kennedy felt cold despite the blistering heat. “What else did they say?”

  “They said you were missing and were likely to try to come to me. That if you came out here I was to notify them immediately, or else they’d make it hard on me. Then they asked me for a list of any other relatives of ours anywhere in the country, and I guess I gave it to them. Then they hung up. Ted, what have you done?”

  Kennedy gripped his brother’s thick arm tightly. “I swear to you I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve been framed by a bunch of criminals, and I have to hide for a while. I want to stay here with you.”

  “That’s what they said you’d want to do. Sorry, Ted. You can’t.”

  “Can’t?”

  Steve shook his head. “I’ve got a wife and five kids, Ted. A place in the community. I can’t risk losing all that They told me I could go to prison for twenty years if I helped you.”

  “It’s a lie!”

  “Be that as it may. You better go somewhere else.” Steve fished into his pocket. “I brought you some money. I guess you need it. Don’t argue; just take it.”

  He pushed a thousand dollars in small bills into Kennedy’s nerveless fingers.

  “I better go now,” Steve said. “Maybe they followed me. If they catch you, don’t tell ’em you saw me at all. Or spoke to me.” Beads of sweat dribbled down Steve’s heavy face; he looked close to tears. “I’m sorry about this, kid. But I have to think of my family first. You understand?”

  “Yeah, Steve. I understand.”

  17

  Kennedy waited fifteen minutes after his brother left, went downstairs, and checked out. He knew the chase was on, now. They had called his brother. Probably they had called anyone in the hemisphere who knew him at all, and bullied them into refusing to give him aid.

  He was on his own, now. And he would have to run.

  Now that the hunt had begun, time was against him. He had to secure his evidence and present it to the U.N., and he had to do it before his pursuers found him. But how, when he was sought by the Corporation and the U.N.? He had no answer. But he knew doggedly he was going to try. He summoned up as much as he could remember of the Ganny poetry—the didactic philosophical poems on survival in a hostile environment. The Gannys knew what suffering meant. And they were tough, those peaceful, violence-hating aliens. Tougher than any Earthman.

  It was dangerous for him to return to New York by any direct route. He decided to go overland, by bus perhaps, taking several weeks to do it. He let a mustache grow, and before he left Milwaukee he visited a barber; his long agency haircut gave way to a midwestern trim that left the back of his neck and his ears bare. That would make him just a little harder to recognize.

  He discovered, with a little shock, that Watsinski, or whoever it was that was continuing the Ganymede colony hoax, had worked him into the framework.

  He was wanted, said the telefaxes and newssheets, for having distributed arms to the Gannys. According to the ’fax he picked up in Chicago three days after leaving Milwaukee, he had been sent to Ganymede to do a series of magazine articles on the colony, but instead had treacherously murdered a member of the colony and had given ammunition to the aliens. Then, being sent back to Earth under arrest, he had escaped and was
being sought for treason against humanity, with a fat reward for his capture.

  He stared at the picture of himself in the telefax. It was an old shot, taken when he was twenty pounds heavier, wore his hair long, and had no mustache. The sleek, complacent face on the shiny yellow sheet bore little resemblance to his own.

  He headed East, keeping himself inconspicuous and crossing streets to avoid Security men. He tried not to get into conversations with strangers. He kept to himself. He was the needle in the haystack of 225,000,000 people, and if he was lucky they might not find him.

  As he moved on, he kept in touch with the news from Ganymede. The character of the bulletins had taken on a distinct new coloration.

  Now there was word of sinister alien armies marching beyond the hills, of bomb detonations and the dry sound of target practice. “The aliens are becoming very resentful of our presence,” wrote Colony Director Lester Brookman in the syndicated column that appeared in the nation’s papers on August 11. “Undoubtedly they have been stirred up by the traitor Theodore Kennedy, who, I understand, is still at large on Earth. They object to our presence on their world and have several times made ugly threats. During the current crisis we do not permit members of the colony to leave the dome in groups of less than three.”

  It was proceeding according to plan, Kennedy thought. The hostile aliens were on the warpath; soon they would be hunting for scalps; then would come the massacre. After that the troops would be called in to wipe out the belligerent savages. It was an old, old pattern of colonial expansion.

  He knew the schedule. By September 17 the world would know that the colony of Earthmen was in imminent danger of being wiped out by the aliens, who refused to listen to reason and enter into peaceful negotiations. Five days of artful cliff-hanging would follow, and on September 22 the Corporation would make preliminary overtures toward the United Nations, asking for a police force to be sent to Ganymede to guard Terran interests. It would not be too strong a plea, for the public would need more manipulating. From September 22 through October 10 the world would pray for the endangered Earthmen; on October 11 the aliens would sweep down from the hills and virtually wipe out the gallant colony.

  And, by October 17, United Nations troops would be on their way to Ganymede to quell the disturbance and police the world to make it safe for the Corporation.

  Kennedy knew he had to act before October 11. After that, no amount of proof would seem convincing to a world determined to believe that a massacre had taken place.

  But how could he get the evidence he needed?

  He was in Trenton, New Jersey, eating lunch in a road-house, when the news came blaring forth: Ganymede Colony Attacked! The day was Sunday, September 17.

  The cook reached over and turned up the radio behind the counter.

  “A surprise alien attack shortly before dawn Ganymede time left the Earth colony on Jupiter’s moon in grave peril today,” came the announcer’s voice. “An estimated five thousand aliens, armed with clubs and native weapons, swept down on the dome that houses the colony, shouting ‘Death to the Earthmen!’ Colony Director Lester Brookman radioed later in the day that the assault had been beaten back, but only with the loss of three Earth lives and considerable damage to the colony.

  “Names of the casualties and further developments will be brought to you as soon as they are released.”

  A pale, pasty-faced woman eating further up along the counter exclaimed, “How horrible! Those poor people, fighting against those savages!”

  “Couple of fellows were talking today that maybe the U.N.’s going to send troops up there to keep everything peaceful,” the cook said. “But they better hurry if they’re going to do it, or there’ll be a massacre.”

  Kennedy frowned tightly, saying nothing, and wolfed his food. He wanted to tell them that their fears were for nothing, that there was no colony up there, that this whole alien attack had sprung full-blown from a public relations agency’s drawing board months before, and was neatly calculated to be revealed this day. That the fierce savages of Ganymede were actually wise and good and harmless people.

  But he could not tell them these things.

  He slipped into New York late that night and rented a room in Manhattan, in a dreary old slum of a hotel in the mid-sixties overlooking the East River. The name he gave was Victor Engel of Brockhurst, Wisconsin.

  The hotel was populated by a curious sort of flotsam— desiccated leftovers from the last century, mostly, who remembered the days when Life Was Really Good. Kennedy, who had taken an intensive course in twentieth-century sociohistory as part of the requirements for his degree in Communications, smiled at the darkest era of the nerve-fraying Cold War of 1946-95, the five decades of agonizing psychological jousting that had led to the Maracaibo Pact and the lasting worldwide unity that had followed. It was as if the Depression of 1995 had wiped away their memories of childhood, taking away the threat of thermonuclear obliteration that had menaced these oldsters during their youth, leaving only a time-hazed remembrance of an Elysian era.

  Well, that was their fantasy, Kennedy thought, and he would not puncture it. The Golden Age syndrome was a common accompaniment to senility, and at least they had the never-never world of their dreams to compensate for the bleakness of their declining days.

  At least they had some form of happiness. And what do I do now? he asked himself.

  He was in New York, but he was no closer to the solution of his problem than if he were still on Ganymede, or on Pluto. He had no access to the incriminating data on file at the agency. He could not simply publicly proclaim his accusations—who would believe the demented ravings of a murderer and a traitor? Time was growing short; in a few weeks, the attack would be made and the Gannys wiped out. And before long he would venture out on the street and be recognized, despite the changes he had made in his appearance.

  On Wednesday he bought a newssheet and read it carefully. There was word from the beleaguered Ganymede colony, carefully fabricated by a Dinoli henchman. There was a notice to the effect that the traitor Theodore Kennedy was still at large, but that security authorities expected to apprehend him shortly.

  And there was a little notice in the Personals column. Kennedy nearly overlooked it, but he read the column out of sheer boredom, hoping to find some diversion.

  The notice said:

  Dearest Ted,

  Will you forgive me? I realize now the mistake I made. Meet me at our home Thursday night and I will try to help you in what you are doing. Believe me, darling.

  M.

  He read it through five or six times. He wondered if it might be a Security trap. No; of course not. It had to be from Marge. She was the one person on this entire world that he could trust.

  He decided to go to her.

  18

  The house seemed to be sleeping; its windows were opaqued, its lawn overgrown and unkempt. Kennedy paid the cab driver and cautiously went up the walk to the door. The .38 was not far from his hand; he was ready in case Security men might be near.

  He put his hand to the door, opened it, went in.

  Marge was waiting in the living room for him.

  She looked bad. She had aged, during the month; her face was pale and she had lost weight. Her hair looked stringy. Her lips were quivering; her face had no make-up on it, and her eyes were darting nervously around the room as Kennedy entered.

  “Marge…”

  “You saw the ad,” she said in a harsh whisper. “I was praying you wouldn’t. You never used to read that part of the paper.”

  “Praying I wouldn’t? But—”

  “Good evening, Ted,” a male voice said. Dave Spalding stepped out of the kitchen. A tiny nickel-jacketed gun glinted in his hand.

  “Spalding? But—”

  “Please put your hands up, Ted. Marge, see if he has a gun.”

  Marge rose and walked unsteadily toward him. Her hands fumbled over him, quickly found the .38 in his pocket, and withdrew it. Silently she handed the gu
n to Spalding, who kept both of them covered during the procedure.

  “I’m glad you didn’t have any strange ideas about that gun, Marge,” Spalding said levelly. There was just the hint of a quaver in his voice. “As I told you before, I can tell when you’re getting ready to do something. You would have been dead five seconds before you pulled the trigger.”

  It irritated Kennedy to hear Spalding speaking this way in his own home. Leadenly he realized he had fallen into a trap with Marge as the bait.

  He said, “What is this, Spalding?”

  “Very simple. You’re a very valuable piece of merchandise to me. I’m glad I got to you before Security did. I figured you might fall for something like this.”

  Kennedy looked at Marge in surprise. “I thought you two were simon-pure idealists. What’s happening?”

  “I left the agency shortly after your trip into space,” Spalding said. “But it occurred to me recently that I might do better for myself if I returned. I phoned Dinoli and offered to find you—in exchange for a second-level position in the agency for myself.”

  Kennedy’s eyes narrowed. “All the cynicism in the air finally made its impression on you, eh, Dave?” The callousness of the younger man’s statements astonished him. “So you used Marge as bait and got me here, and now you’ll sell me to Dinoli so you can get back into the agency you despised so much a few months ago. Very pretty, Dave.”

  Something like torment appeared on Spalding’s face for a moment. Kennedy said nothing, staring at the gun in the other’s hand.

  He wasn’t too surprised. He had always suspected that Spalding was a man of no real convictions, following the tide and struggling to find a safe port He had found that port now. He had given up trying to swim upstream.

 

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