The Secret Galactics

by A. E. van Vogt

  Carl thought: ‘Oh, good girl, Silver. She did it.’

  He saw another, larger possibility: that his own personal problem with these people would be solved with their arrest.

  He was instantly exultant. In one night, everything. What fantastic good fortune.

  In the large room, the men started to mill around. It was a phenomenon of emotion, Carl noted; and it was fascinating to watch.

  Every single person, except the big man and Henry—who was at the phone—moved swiftly from where he had been. It was a reaction only. Nobody went anywhere, really. And after a few moments, they were frozen again.

  The big man, who had watched the spectacle with an expression of contempt, now said to Henry, ‘Tell the police we’ll come out as directed,’ He waited while the tall man did so. Then: ‘Hang up.’

  Henry put the receiver down on its cradle; and Paul continued, ‘Don’t you realize, all of you—’ his tone was seething—‘that this doesn’t mean anything. Our story will be simply that we were invited here—and found the bodies.’ He addressed Henry again, ‘Phone Gilbert and have him get over to the police station. I want him there when we arrive.’

  The thin man hastily consulted a little notebook and then dialed a number. Henry listened for several seconds, then looked up, shaking his head, ‘He’s not home.’

  Paul’s face had turned brick red. But still he maintained that dead-level voice, ‘Okay, call Silver. Tell her the situation. Tell her to contact either Gilbert or one of the others like him, as quickly as possible. She’ll understand.’

  Henry dialed with quick nervous movements. But after a minute he reported reluctantly. ‘No answer, sir.’

  Carl, who had been watching again, and listening with a return of his detachment, felt a second surge of elation as the name, Silver, was spoken. He was awed. In a single visit, not only was he instrumental in defeating this whole gang but he was also getting his first clue as to who Silver was.

  But he was quickly critical of his past gullibility in relation to her. She had always implied that some kind of ESP was her method of locating the various murders that she guided him to. Obviously, now, that was not a requirement. Since she was known to the gang, she obviously got her information by a mundane method. She was an insider. In fact, from the way Paul referred to her—could it be, was it possible, that she was Paul’s wife?

  Carl fought down a foolish moment of jealousy—he actually thought of it as foolish, for him, in his circumstances, to be jealous not only of his own wife, Marie, but of another man’s wife. Nonetheless, there was a grimness in him as he surmised that the mysterious references to the ‘ship’ had an equally practical, underlying explanation.

  Intent, determined, striving for a pragmatic attitude, he watched the scene in front of him.

  The big man’s lips had compressed. He was parting them to say something more, when there was a heavy pounding at the door. Paul nodded distractedly. ‘All right,’ he commanded, ‘all of you start going out there to surrender. Henry and I will stay to the last, and keep phoning.’ When no one moved, Paul’s voice went up half an octave. ‘Joe, you first; then you, Phil, Art, Peter and the rest of you.’

  The naming of names established an order of precedence. The egress began. In the minutes that followed, Carl heard the front door open and close many times. Apparently, each time, one—and only one—member of the gang went outside. And the police were evidently quite happy to have them come at that sedate pace.

  During those minutes, Henry called one after another of the people in his little notebook, and suddenly there was an answer. Henry spoke briefly to whoever it was, and then held the receiver out to Paul. ‘Remember Ginsey?’ he asked. The big man made a face, then said into the phone, ‘Ginsey, here is your chance to rehabilitate yourself with the organization. Listen—’ Quickly, he explained what had happened, and what he wanted—which was simply for Ginsey to continue trying to locate and advise certain persons. Whoever Ginsey was—whether man or woman—he (she) must have promised. For Paul replaced the receiver, stood for a long moment, and then followed Henry out into the hallway. Twice more, the front door opened and closed. And there was silence.

  Chapter Four

  A THOUSAND VOICES FROM THE STARS

  One minute and twenty-two seconds went by on the clock inside Carl, Then the distant front door opened. There was a rapid padding of soft rubber-soled shoes, and then four members of a police goon squad, in padded clothing and close-fitted helmets, rushed into the room.

  They paused briefly to survey the two dead bodies. And one of them said, ‘If Mabel could see me now.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said a second, ‘that goes for Irma. She thinks her darling—that’s me—is engaged in special police work. And, boy, I sure am. Go in first, and help take care of any tough guys that may still be lingering.’

  ‘C’mon,’ said a third, curtly, ‘you know damn well both of you get a kick out of being goons. Let’s go.’

  The last speaker must have been in charge of the quartet. After his command, no more words were spoken. They started silently forward on their soft rubber shoes, and loped in single file through the alcove past Carl. They took with them his respect. No question, theirs was the preliminary dangerous task. Enter a risk area first. Be ready to grab, and hold, and fight. While a city slept peacefully, these men were doing their job in this violated house. Fortunately—Carl deduced—they would probably find no one.

  He had no time to consider them further. Several uniformed police officers entered the room. After they, also, surveyed what was in the room, one of them picked up the phone, dialed, and said, ‘Give me Captain Gates.’ There was a pause; then: ‘This is Lieutenant Turcott, sir. Two bodies here. So we’ll be on this job for some time. Send the necessary, will you?’

  He hung up, and mentioned to a plumpish aide in the uniform of a sergeant of police. ‘Better call your wife now,’ he said, ‘while we’re waiting, and the lines are clear.’

  The plump man came forward sheepishly, picked up the phone dialed, and said, ‘Hi, honey … Yeah, I’m in a house where a murder’s been committed, and I’ll be here probably until dawn on the details. That takes care of me for tonight… No, we captured a bunch of guys. They offered no resistance … Only the dead man here, and us cops. So you can go to sleep. G’night.’

  He hung up, and visibly heaved a sigh of relief. ‘Thanks, pal,’ he said to Turcott. He made a gesture with his hands. ‘I tell you that woman can’t sleep until I phone.’

  ‘No problem,’ was the reply. ‘I’m lucky. That’s one difficulty I don’t have with Martha. When she gets sleepy, she just has to lean towards the bed. After that she doesn’t have time to think about what it’s like for me to be in the homicide squad on the night shift.’

  The routine police procedures that began presently took approximately two hours, at which time the bodies were carried out, and individuals began to leave. An hour after that, the lieutenant instructed two of his men to remain outside the house and keep a watch on it.

  At this stage, only two police officers were apparently left in the house. One was Lieutenant Turcott, and the other, an older man—a grave-faced, forty-ish individual.

  Turcott said, ‘I’d like to see that machinery downstairs.’

  ‘This way,’ said the other. He added, ‘It looks like a computer to me.’ They walked out into the hallway, and Carl could hear them heading toward the rear of the house on the far side of the staircase.

  About fifteen minutes went by, and then once more footsteps came closer. The two policemen re-entered the room, and this time it was the older man who, after glancing at his watch, said with an apologetic smile, ‘I’ll use that phone for a personal call, if you don’t mind. Ingrid wants to be awakened by five o’clock, and it’s almost that. She likes to be bathed, and perfumed, and made up, when I get home at 8:15.’

  Turcott said in an incredulous tone, ‘Three hours to get dressed!’

  ‘She doesn’t dress,’ was the la
conic reply.

  Turcott’s handsome face twisted into a moue of comprehension. He waved the man toward the phone, waited until the call had been made, and then said, ‘I want to make one last check after everybody’s gone.’

  His companion said, ‘I’ll wait for you at the front door.’ He walked off and out of sight.

  Turcott had paused inside the hall door. From there he surveyed the room. His gaze lingered for several seconds on Carl but finally moved on and away.

  He turned and departed. The front door banged shut for the last time.

  Carl waited, as no less than three car motors started up outside, and there was the familiar sound of automobiles getting into motion. The sound faded into the distance.

  Carl did not move immediately, because … What was my overall impression?—It was an old technique of his after a meeting: to review what had happened. Often, many insights emerged.

  Abruptly, that happened again.

  The women, he thought, amazed.

  Not a single woman had been present the entire night. Nevertheless, women had dominated the thoughts and attitudes of just about every male present. Including the policemen. Including—really—himself.

  Carl was not actually surprised. It was an old theory of his that all human problems were female in origin.

  Well-l-ll—modification: money and possessions were right in there. Money, and what it could buy. Property, the security it brought—and the women it attracted. Still, just about every male who wanted a woman could get some version of one. But not all men took the trouble, as he had done, to learn how to get money. So that was a vaguer impulse, except for some minimum eating and shelter requirements.

  Okay—wearily—what now?

  Carl rolled his six-wheeler over to where the single dead body had lain, when he first arrived. He looked down at that face again, this time in his mind’s eye.

  He had a difficulty then. The emotion that came was not one that he could recall ever experiencing before: compassion. Whoever the dead man was, he had refused to be part of a plot. The refusal had cost him his life; and for a reason not clear that affected the one-time cold fish, Dr. Carl Hazzard.

  The police had determined that his name was Jess Hodder; and he was a man who, apparently, had once accepted the tenets of the alienoids and their leader. It would be hard to decide what that leader, Paul, believed, and what he didn’t. Cult bosses had to act as if they had special knowledge about what the organization stood for. Paul had come through effectively on that level. And, in fact, no question: Paul was a powerful personality.

  As these additional awarenesses ran their courses through Carl, the emotion of regret that had briefly seized on him faded. Whereupon, he began to consider his own situation. What he wanted to do, would—he analyzed—have to be done carefully. The obstacle consisted of two constables who had been left to keep an eye on the house. Getting past them would take timing—and time.

  While he waited for the two men to establish their routine, he searched for and found the stairway leading down to the basement … That machinery—

  It was a broad and not at all ordinary type of basement stairway. Clearly, it had been built as a passageway for bulky objects; and Carl eased his six-wheeled ‘self down onto a concrete-floored corridor, which was filled up on one side all the way up to the ceiling with what looked like the massive metal switchboard of a large machine. The metallic paneling ran along the entire front to rear length of the house, about sixty feet.

  Carl drove the full length, taking a quick look. His purpose: As a physicist who knew a lot about computers, he scanned the paneling for a company name or other markings that would identify the manufacturer and the make.

  Nothing. No words … He returned more slowly, scanning for additional details. He had already noticed a control section. Now, he paused. First, he freed a jack cord from its receptacle in a little door in his own ‘body.’ Next, he reached up with one of his ‘hand-arms’ and plugged the jack into the top socket—one of several in the control paneling of the computer. As he had half-expected, the ohm-resistance was many times different from what his own system was set for. And so he had to do a hasty job of switching from one resistor circuit to’ another until he achieved a matching effect.

  He could only hope that the adjustment, rapid though it had been, had not registered on another control board somewhere; or, if it had, the control board had not been under observation during the crucial moments.

  He forgot that. Something was coming through. His first awareness was, he had a sense of distance, as if he were on long-line telephone link-up. A faint echoing sound came from that distance, the kind of hum that was usually associated with a lot of energy.

  The sound took on a shape in his brain. Something was stirring. An incredible, fantastic something. Colossal, superhuman something.

  The sound became a murmur of voices. Not only one voice. Many, incredibly many. Suddenly, a thousand voices were in his brain, speaking to him.

  The ‘something’ seemed to sense that he was not capable of receiving such a quantity of information. The voices ceased. There was a pause. Carl waited, not knowing what to expect; and he was about to put his jack into the next-below socket, when—

  A single voice said:

  ‘From: Administrative Centre, To: Sub S, Logical Operation—Subject: Intruding Control Impulse. Message: “Urgently request investigation of unusual phenomenon affecting Command Core.” ’

  Carl experienced a strong mental tension as he recognized that he was listening to machine message format. And, more important, the message indicated that his act of connecting himself to the computer had been detected.

  Carl waited, not happy, startled by the speed of the detection system.

  The initial steps of what followed were a simple procedure for whatever was doing the investigation. After only forty-three complex operations (each of which involved a mere thousand or so sub-operations) the analyzing unit decided that the intrusion derived from one of the three U.S.-based computers.

  As it reached that conclusion, it said:

  From: Administration Centre

  To: Command Core

  Subject: Intruding Control Impulse

  Requested: Instructions for dealing with intruder

  Recommended: Destruct.

  At that precise instant, a somewhat awed—and partly convinced—Carl tugged his insert jack from the socket, and zoomed for the stairs. In all the minutes of flight that followed, he felt blank as to the real meaning of what he had heard. It seemed to him that, later, he could think about what it implied.

  Chapter Five

  THE CYCLE IS COMPLETED

  The morning papers had arrived about two hours after Carl rolled into the Brain Room and connected himself to his various recharging units.

  There was nothing on the front page. Not a word. Carl thereupon undertook the complicated—for him—task of leafing through each page of both papers. There was not a single reference to the arrests of the previous night.

  At first it merely seemed improbable. Then he began to think of reasons … The arrests had not been monitored in time to make the first editions. Yet already another memory was emerging. ‘Ginsey,’ he told himself, ‘must finally have got hold of Gilbert, and Gilbert came down to the police station.’

  It implied—political pull, control of newspapers, influence on the city, county, and even state level. Carl waited with a tiny hope for the second editions. But when they also had no mention of the previous night’s events, he found that he was already resigned to the new reality.

  Still didn’t matter. But since he was a person who reasoned from cause to effect (where such applied) he had already had an unhappy thought.

  At this point, he badly wanted to make a phone call; the question was, from where dare he make it? Not from a pay phone; too complicated for him except in an extreme emergency. So?

  In the end, he put the call through the large switchboard in the main lab building. The hundr
ed or so phones connected to it provided, not so much anonymity, as a barrier. If anyone came looking for him, he would have time to get away.

  After he had made his request of the woman who intoned the words, ‘Central Police Headquarters,’ there was a pause. Then a man’s voice came on the line. ‘Lieutenant Turcott is not in. Will someone else do?’

  ‘No, it has to be he,’ said Carl.

  ‘Turcott,’ was the reply, ‘is ill and hospitalized. May I take a message?’

  ‘Can you give me his home phone number?’ Carl persisted,

  ‘Just a moment.’

  As the moment this time lengthened, Carl decided that they were trying to trace the phone that he was calling from. Regretfully, he hung up … Okay, he thought, so they have the same feeling about Turcott as I have.

  A key figure, Turcott, whom they would want to dispose of.

  Carl was a man in a hurry now. Because, of course, for this he bore some responsibility. He might deduce that the alienoids had their own intent to destroy the officer. And that his inquiry would only hasten the action. But, still, it could be no murder purpose existed until he phoned.

  The gang knew, or would shortly know, that two outsiders were involved. They must already have been apprised that a woman had phoned in the alarm the previous night, and brought an innocent police group down on their heads. And they would undoubtedly soon learn that a man’s voice had asked about the principal police officer—an innocent who had acquired frightfully valuable information like names and addresses of the arrested people.

  So they knew that a man and a woman … at least … were meddling. Confronted by the implications of that, the alienoids would waste no time.