“Sorry, Major,” Reynolds said casually, untwisting the wires. “Hit the cortical centers that time, didn’t I? Won’t let it happen again.”
Harris did not reply. The pain was receding slowly, leaving a residue of aches, but it was not his place to protest. He watched as with steady, unquivering fingers Reynolds affixed the bead to the minute wires already set into Harris’ leg, and closed the wound with nuplast. Harris covered himself again. He felt only a faint itching where the fleshy trapdoor had been opened.
Carver said, “You activate it by pressing against the left-hip neural nexus. It’s self-shielding for a distance of three feet around you, so make sure none of your victims are any closer than that. It won’t work during an embrace, for instance.”
Harris met the suggestion with a blank stare.
Reynolds said, “You’ll find that it radiates a pretty potent subsonic. A guaranteed knockout for a radius of forty feet.”
“Fatal?’
“Not to complex organisms. It’ll kill anything lesser than a primate, though.”
“And suppose the Medlins are shielded against subsonics?” Harris asked.
Carver chuckled confidently. “This is a variable-cycle transmitter, Major. If they’ve perfected anything that can shield against a random wave, we might as well give up right now.”
“They’ve shown some other very surprising abilities,” Harris pointed out.
“I’m inclined to think they’ll be incapable of shielding against this,” Reynolds said. “It would take technology of an overwhelmingly high order—an inconceivable high order—to work out any defense against a subsonic. The very simplicity of the device makes it impossible to counteract. Shall we test it?”
“We’d better,” Carver said. Reynolds gestured, and Tompkins and Patterson disappeared into one of the other rooms, returning with three cages containing some small Terran mammals. Harris did not recognize any of the species, but none looked to be of any high order of intelligence.
“We’ll go down the hall,” Carver said. “We’ll signal you when we’re out of range, and you see how your subsonic works.”
Harris nodded tightly. The five Darruui left the room. Harris stared at the animals in the cages, and small beady eyes stared back at him, almost seeming to comprehend what he was about to do.
“All right!” Carver called from the distance.
Harris hesitated a moment. Then his hand slipped to his hip, and he pressed inward.
He felt nothing.
But the animals in the cage began to writhe and scream in sudden agony.
The smaller ones suffered least. For them, the pain ended quickly, and they slumped to the floor of their cages, tails twitching for a moment, small feet outstretching rigidly, claws grasping air for a moment and then going stiff.
The larger ones fought the subsonic more sturdily. Then they, too, succumbed, toppling with soft thuds, curling grotesquely into imitations of sleep.
Harris took his hand from his hip. He walked toward the cages, opened one, thrust his fingers in. He touched the small furry cadavers, felt only stiffness and death. Eyes that had been beady a moment before now looked unnaturally glossy as they peered unblinkingly out at him, accusingly.
“Well?” Carver yelled.
“It worked,” he said. “You can come back in now! It’s all over!”
The five Darruui filed back into the room. Reynolds took the animals from the cages and examined them.
“Dead,” he said. “Every one.”
“But it won’t kill human beings?” Harris asked.
“It’ll only stun them,” Reynolds told him. “Even at close range. It’s impossible to design a subsonic that can kill other human beings without killing its carrier in the bargain.”
“And they can’t shield against it?”
“No,” Carver said. “The only way to defend against it is to key the shield to the random cycles, as your shield is keyed. But how can they do that? You can’t fail, Harris. That’s a guarantee.”
SEVEN
One at a time, the six Darruui agents filed out into the streets and scattered. Harris had to walk almost a mile before he emerged from the bleak, deserted warehouse district and found an area civilized enough to have a helitaxi ramp. He reached his hotel shortly before midnight, and, ravenous, ordered a meal sent to his room.
As he undressed for bed, he studied his hip and thigh. There was no sign of anything unusual in either place, he saw. But yet he was equipped very efficiently to stun anyone who came within forty feet of him. If he had been so equipped the other night, Beth Baldwin would be dead by now, and none of this would have happened.
Just as well, he realized. It was only by being captured that he had learned of the true extent of the Medlin operation on Earth. If he had simply killed Beth outright the first night, Darruu would have no hint of the real purpose of the Medlin agents.
He switched off the light.
He slept, but not well.
In the morning, he rode across town to the Medlin headquarters, far to the southeast. Everything was arranged well enough. The helitaxi let him off several blocks from the building, and, as he waited on the crowded corner, he watched the Darruui group assemble.
There was Carver, leaning against a lamppost and reading a newspaper.
Reynolds, gazing into the window of a wineshop diagonally across the street.
McDermott, pacing up and down before a bank and staring at his wristwatch every few minutes.
Patterson, browsing peacefully in a bookstall.
Tompkins, standing by the display of some open-air huckster trying to sell household appliances.
It was all innocent enough. The five of them were well spaced, far from one another. No one could possibly link them. No one could possibly guess that those five were alien creatures in Earther skin.
In turn, each glanced up, looked at him, nodded, then went back to what he was doing. Harris made the Darruui recognition-signal and moved along to carry out his deadly assignment.
It was all so very simple, he thought as he walked up the block to the building that housed the Medlin headquarters. Simply walk in, smile politely, make a little harmless conversation with the Medlins.
Then stun them all with the subsonic, and boil their brains with your disruptor.
He reached the Medlin headquarters building and paused outside it, thinking.
Around him, Earthmen hurried to their jobs. He looked up. The sky was blindingly blue, flecked here and there with white fleece. But behind the peaceful blue of that sky lay the nightblack vault of space, and the burning orbs of the stars.
Many of those stars swore allegiance to Darruu. Others, to Medlin.
Which was right? Which wrong? Neither? Both?
A block away, five fellow Darruui lurked in seeming innocence, ready to come to his aid if he had any trouble in killing the Medlins. But he doubted that he would have trouble, if the subsonic was as effective and as foolproof as Carver seemed to think it would be. It had worked with chilling enough effectiveness on the test animals. But he had learned in the past few days not to underestimate the abilities of the Medlins.
For forty Darruui years, he had been trained to hate the Medlins, root and branch, man and child and babe in the womb; Now, in just a few more minutes, he would be doing what was considered the noblest act a Servant of the Spirit could possibly perform—ridding the universe of a pack of them.
Yet he felt no sense of anticipated glory. His deed would be simply murder, nothing more glamorous than that. The murder of strangers in strange skins.
He entered the building.
He remembered this lobby all too well—the vast concourse, the arching ceiling high overhead, the crowd of Earthmen bustling past. He made his way to one of the Down grav-shafts. The Earthers had run out of space in the upper reaches of their cities, having built a hundred and a hundred fifty stories high and daring to build no higher, and so they burrowed into the ground. This building rose ninety stor
ies into the air, and dropped a hundred more into the sub-city bowels.
He rode down, down, down. The gravshaft’s drop halted, finally. He got out, moved as in a dream down the by-now-familiar corridor toward the Medlin headquarters. It seemed to him that he could feel the pressure of the tiny subsonic generator in his thigh. He knew that it was only an illusion, a trick, but the presence of the metal bead irritated him all the same.
He stood for a moment in a scanner field in front of the Medlins’ door. He expected to be questioned, but no questions came, and in a moment a door flicked back suddenly, out of sight, and a strange face peered at him—an Earthman face, on the surface of things, square-jawed and fleshy and deeply tanned.
The Earthman beckoned him in. Harris stepped through the door and felt it slice shut behind him.
“I’m Armin Moulton,” the Earthman said in a deep voice. He did not put out his hand, nor did Harris offer his. “You’re Major Harris?”
“That’s right.”
“We’re glad you came. Beth is waiting to see you inside.”
The last time he had been here, he had been too dazed, too numbed by the after effects of his stunning, to observe very much. Now he saw that the Medlin offices were capacious and extensive, with rooms going off in all directions. No doubt the cell in which they had kept him for the night was at the end of one of those corridors. The furnishings in the rooms were attractive and not inexpensive.
He followed Moulton inside.
He thought coldly, The subsonic has a range of forty feet in any direction. It stuns but does not kill. No one should be closer to you than three feet. Your shielding protects you.
He was shown into an inner room well furnished with colorful drapes and hangings. A warm light glowed from indirect sources.
Beth stood in the middle of the room, smiling at him. Today she wore thick, shapeless clothes, quite unlike the seductive garb she had had on when Harris first collided with her in that carefully prearranged and premeditated “accident” in the hotel corridor.
There were others in the room. Harris felt a coldness at the presence of so many of the enemy. He recognized the other Medlin, the plump pseudo-Earther Coburn, and the giant named Wrynn who claimed to be an Earthman of some new and superior species. There was another woman of Wrynn’s size in the room, a great golden creature nearly a foot taller than Harris, of breathtaking beauty and elegance. And there were two people of normal size who were probably Medlins in disguise.
“Well?” Beth asked.
In a tight voice Harris said, “He’s dead. I’ve just come from there.”
“How did you carry it out?” Beth asked.
“Disruptor,” Harris said, keeping his voice in check. He saw several of the Medlins exchange glances. The two huge Earthers were regarding him with open, neutral expressions on their faces. Harris said, “It was… unpleasant. For me as well as for him.”
“I imagine it would have been,” Beth said.
He looked at her, wondering if he had succeeded in getting away with it. He was quivering with tension. He made no attempt to conceal it, since a man who had just killed his direct superior, and thus had committed high treason against his world, might be expected to show some signs of extreme tension.
“Eight Darruui to go,” Coburn said. “And four are in another hemisphere.”
“We know their location,” Beth said. “We’ll get them all in time. But first we’ll concentrate on the others in this area. The ones who call themselves Tompkins, Patterson, McDermott, Reynolds.”
Harris felt a chill. They knew every name! How did they know so much? Who was the traitor?
He looked around.
“Who are these people?” he asked, to break the tension. “You haven’t told me their names.”
Beth smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry. I was eager to find out how you had done.” She pointed to the two normal-sized ones, and introduced them as disguised Medlin agents named Kranz and Marichal. The giant girl, Beth told him, was Wrynn’s wife, a supergirl.
Harris frowned thoughtfully. There were a hundred Medlin agents on Earth, he knew. Four of them were right in this room, and it was reasonable to expect that two or three more might be at headquarters, within the forty-foot range of the concealed subsonic in his thigh. With luck, he might succeed in stunning and then killing as many as nine or ten of the Medlins on Earth.
Not a bad haul at all, he thought. Nearly ten percent of the whole Medlin complement in one swoop. And, two of these oversize Earthers. Reynolds and his scalpel would have to get to work on Wrynn and his wife once they were safely dead, Harris thought. Dissect them and see if Medlin gristle or Earther bone lay beneath their skins.
Suddenly Harris began to tremble.
Beth said, “I suppose you don’t even know who and where the other Darruui are yourself, do you?”
“I’ve only been on Earth a couple of days, you know,” Harris said, shaking his head. “There wasn’t time to make contact with anyone but Carver. I don’t even know the names of the other agents.”
He stared levelly at her as he uttered the lie. The expression on her face was unreadable. It was impossible to tell whether she believed he had actually killed Carver, actually did not know the identities of his Darruui comrades on Earth.
“Things have happened fast to you, haven’t they?” Beth said. She drew a tridim photo from a case and handed it to Harris. “This is your next victim,” she said. “He goes under the name of Reynolds here. You’ll find him right here in this city, I think. You should know how to make contact with him. He’s the second-in-command in your group. First-in-command now, I suppose, since Carver’s dead.”
Harris studied the photo. The face of the fleshy, balding man who had inserted the subsonic beneath the skin of his thigh peered up at him. Reynolds, who was so close now.
Tension mounted in him.
He felt the faint rasp rasp rasp in his stomach. It was the agreed-upon code. Carver, waiting nearby, was buzzing to find out if he were having any trouble, needed any help.
Casually, Harris put his hand to his side, and kneaded the flesh with the heel of his palm, as though trying to ease the pain of an attack of indigestion. The signal he sent out told Carver that nothing had happened yet, that everything was all right. An acknowledging double buzz came from within.
Harris handed the photo back to Beth.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of him.”
“You should be able to find him in a day or so,” she said. “Make contact quickly and get him out of the way. There are still seven more after him, and we don’t have much time to waste.”
“I’ll get him tomorrow,” Harris vowed.
I press the neural nexus in the left hip and render them unconscious. Then I kill them all with the disruptor and leave.
Very simple.
In such easy ways do we win the Grace of the Spirit, he thought.
He looked at Beth, still radiantly lovely despite the deliberate glamorlessness of her clothing, and thought that in a few minutes she would lie here dead on the floor, as dead as those pitiful little glossy-eyed Terran animals in their cages. She would die, and Coburn, and the other two Medlins, and these giants who claimed to be Earthmen of some new super-species.
He tensed.
His hand stole toward his hip.
Then Beth broke the tension momentarily by saying, “Would you like to have a drink with us. Major? To celebrate your conversion to the forces of light?”
“No,” he said. “I… I don’t like liquor much…”
“Oh, really!” Beth laughed. “That isn’t the impression I got the other night.”
He frowned. Somehow it seemed even more blasphemous to take refreshment from these people and then to kill them. But they were putting him in an awkward position. Already, Coburn was producing a bottle and seven glasses. He began to pour a cloudy amber fluid. Gravely, he handed the glasses around until everyone in the room held one.
“Wha
t are we drinking?” Harris asked.
“Vriyl,” Beth said. “It’s a liqueur.”
“An Earther liqueur?” he asked.
“No,” she said with a pleasant smile. “A Medlin liqueur. We brought some with us.”
Harris’ hand shook so badly that he nearly spilled his drink. His stomach churned at the idea of drinking a Medlin beverage, of toasting with the enemy.
Beth saw the tremor and said, “It must have been a terrible nervous strain, killing him. You look extremely disturbed.”
“You’ve overturned all the values of my life,” Harris said glibly. “That can shake a man up.”
Beth turned triumphantly to Coburn and said, “You didn’t think I’d succeed!” To Harris she explained, “Coburn didn’t think you could be trusted.”
Coburn smiled uncomfortably. “Well, all that’s past, now. Cheers, everyone.”
Glasses went to lips. All but Harris’. He lifted his glass halfway, then gagged at the smell of the nauseous stuff and hurled liqueur and glass together to the floor. As the others looked at him in surprise, he said, “Coburn was right. I can’t be trusted.”
He activated the subsonic.
EIGHT
The first waves of inaudible below-the-threshold sound rippled out from the focus on his thigh, ignoring false flesh and striking through to the Medlin core beneath. Protected by the three-foot cone of his shield, Harris nevertheless felt sick to the stomach, rocked by the reverberating sound waves that poured from the pellet embedded in his thigh. Stabbing spasms of nausea shivered through him a dozen times a second.
But he was getting off lightly, compared with the others in the room.
Coburn, his face mottled by shock and anger, was reaching for his weapon, but he never got to it. Nerves refused to carry the messages of the angry brain. His arm drooped slackly. He slumped over, falling heavily to the floor.
Beth fell even more rapidly, dropping within an instant of the first waves.
The other two Medlins fell.
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