The Secret Galactics

by A. E. van Vogt

  Marie did not hear those words either in any real meaning of hearing. Oh, the sounds went into her ears. And they registered somewhere inside her brain. But the communication came to one of those dead ends that people have inside them. And vanished.

  She got up. As she dressed, she recalled vaguely that Carl had once given her a pistol. But she had long ago carefully mislaid it. Pistols killed. Whereas her trusty little gas capsule discharger merely anesthetized.

  Clutching the discharger in one hand, she walked over to the unconscious woman.

  And stood there looking down at her.

  Marie thought:—There’s really a kind of satisfaction hitting, in effect—the gas gun hit its victim with a capsule that penetrated the skin—a woman who had cuckolded you. If that was the right term for it.

  She was momentarily distracted. Was there a word for it when it was done to a wife? Or was the meaning of cuckolding entirely a derivative of the almost endless ages of male dominance?

  Swiftly—because the gas soon lost its power—she put that out of her mind. Somewhat more slowly, she dragged the inert body through the kitchen and out of the side door into the garage. The night out there was blessedly pitch. But, since she did need a little bit of light to start, she went back and opened the kitchen door a crack. With that she could see her problem. But the actual strength required to drag Silver onto the floor of the rear seat was almost too much for Marie.

  For a long while after the task was done, she stood beside the open door of the car literally gasping for breath, and half leaning against the side of the car. Because of this accident of position, and the enforced (but otherwise peaceful) unmoving wait, she now had her first good look at Silver. In fact, she couldn’t stop herself. There, directly beneath her eyes, was the platinum hair and the wonderful face.

  After a while the beauty of her was shocking … Carl was permitted to make love to that body and to kiss that face! For God’s sake—it seemed wrong. It seemed as if, surely, somebody who was better looking than Carl of the gaunt cheeks and the too lean, even emaciated body, should have had possession of the woman who now lay so still in a drugged unconsciousness.

  The sharp awareness of Silver’s good looks brought a memory—

  In her restless seeking for a man, when she was in college, Marie had never required beauty of male appearance. She had not too high an opinion of her own looks; so she had made an unconscious adjustment in the direction of wanting intelligence in the man. Nothing absolutely displastic, of course, on the physical side. Overweight automatically rejected in a young male person; later—the thought was there—all right. But now, no. And nothing shorter than her own five-five and a half.

  Searching. Looking with haunted eyes at the passing faces. Walking. Joining groups. Taking special courses. Casually brushing aside unacceptable masculine hands that reached for her. No sense of being cruel about that.

  Suddenly, in her senior year, there was Carl. He was a post graduate student, already possessed of his M.A., heading for a Ph.D. He came out of the murk around her, and reached. And—just like that—she reached back.

  In her there was no thought, ever, of asking where he had been until now. Not the faintest question as to what he might have been doing. In the deeps at the back of her mind was an image of her father, quiet, shrewd, loyal, responsible, slightly satiric, delightful; and Carl looked a little bit like that.

  End of search. Oh, she held him off a little bit. And she was always a little startled when she looked into those dark, knowing eyes. But she had infinite trust. Naturally, also, she knew that once you found your guy you slept with him. So, on the third night, she was in bed with an eager, sophisticated male who was visibly startled when his demanding penetration drew a gush of virginal blood.

  Unknown to Marie, he went through his usual pattern with this, his 193rd conquest: sex twelve to twenty-five times; no more. Meanwhile, previous girls being phased out, new girls experiencing their first rush.

  So unsuspecting Marie was phased out.

  It did not for one minute cross her mind that she had been captured by a male operator. Used and abused. And dropped. She phoned him as before. He did his normal excusing about studying, and she absolutely accepted his statements as truth itself.

  (After a couple of excuses like that, the average young female suddenly gets the message. Feels the awful shock of realization. Has that intense sense of degration and grief. And of course withdraws, and never phones again.)

  Marie lived unto herself. In finding Carl, she had confided in no one. In letting him come to her apartment, she had been just a little bit shy and embarrassed about a man staying at her place overnight, so she herself had suggested that he come up the back stairs.

  What does a male operator do when he has a trusting innocent on his hands? Carl had had wide-eyed types before, and when they didn’t get the thought, he finally, bluntly, told them not to bother him anymore. Naturally, he blamed them. That was always his tactic: get the girl feeling as if there was something wrong with her.

  What he accused them of was that they had not come to him, pure.

  They had been deflowered—he said—before they pretended to fall in love with him … For God’s sake, some of the young women had replied, this is the modern age. What are you?—a male chauvinist … But they felt guilty. And regretted having had previous experience.

  And accepted his rejection.

  On a campus where there are thirty thousand students, a male operator can be so hidden that the chances of his accidentally meeting a former girl friend are almost zero. Particularly if he stays away from girls who attend the same classes as he does.

  When Marie continued to call, Carl could not accuse her of having had other men. Besides—the fact that she had been a virgin until he met her kept niggling at the back of his mind. He had, of course, had a lot of virgins in high school—but not at Marie’s age. At twenty-two, as pretty as she was, she was an almost unbelievable find. He phased her out before that really struck him.

  But even that realization might merely have led to another period of casual dalliance while he savored what was by far the simplest super-intelligent pretty girl he had ever met. Instead, an unusual coincidence occurred. On the day that he was motivated to call her, an automatic female reaction was triggered in Marie. It was not that she was actually suspicious. But she had had a thought.

  Really (she told herself, remembering something that somebody had once said, and which she had dismissed at the time as being beneath her … because, when two people genuinely loved, they didn’t have to play games)—really, I was too easy. When a man puts study ahead of sex with a girl, something is lacking in her. Therefore I’m going to have to play hard to get when he finally thinks he has time for me.

  A similar type of logic used in physics would never have got her an A in that, her major. But it would not be until years later that an observation in Ms. Craig’s unpublished work, Men Are Doomed, would finally explain the devastation it wrought upon Carl Hazzard, soon to be a Ph.D. in physics.

  He had suddenly got a yearning. Memories came that even he in a way recognized as being slightly exaggerated, of how great it had been to make love to Marie.

  So he called her.

  She was cool.

  He insisted.

  She became difficult.

  Then her father fell ill; was not expected to live … come at once. She tried to phone Carl. He was out, of course, making love to another girt. She called far into the wee hours; but Carl didn’t come back to his apartment that night.

  In the morning she flew off to her father’s bedside. And stayed there until he got well. Two and a half weeks later she came back.

  While at home she had been doing a lot of what people call thinking, about Carl not being at his apartment at all for an entire sleep period.

  Okay, she thought, so he was out with someone else.

  Finis, by God.

  She actually thought of herself as a woman who had come to u
nderstand life in a deep sense.

  She wouldn’t talk to him. She hung up on him. He haunted her doorstep. She called the police and had him removed.

  Then she began to hear reports that he was drinking heavily. In fact, he phoned her a couple of times; and his voice had that thick liquorie sound.

  Fortunately, he had his Ph.D. before this disaster set in.

  Then he disappeared.

  Marie briskly took her M.A. And then her Ph.D. And who should be at the convocation but a dapper, well-dressed, gaunt, black-eyed, charming young man arrayed in the uniform of a lieutenant commander in the navy, none other than Dr. Carl Hazzard.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Now. Tonight. In Reno.’

  ‘Okay.’

  The month of honeymoon in Reno had the look of one of those dramatic love affairs that a girl dreams of. A perfect marriage. And then—

  He lost interest. (Carl had his own explanation for that.)

  Years later, Marie finally read the aphorism by that astute male watcher, Ms. Craig, which referred to such an inversion. It stated simply, ‘The terrifying neurosis of the Real Man is that he wants what he can’t have, and doesn’t want what he can (Observation Number 28, Men Are Doomed, by Ms. Craig).

  Gazing at the limp form of Silver, standing there in her garage—lighted only by a sliver of brightness from the slightly ajar kitchen door, Marie thought:—Silver was hard to get. She was available only if he did some insane thing like going to dead bodies that she knew about.

  The analysis seemed true; and it was a lifting thing inside her to have come to such a quick understanding of the situation. Eagerly, Marie went back into her bedroom and secured Silver’s purse, where it lay on the floor, and then her own from the drawer of a dresser that was from top to bottom made of gleaming pieces of fine china.

  She emptied both purses into two separate little piles on her bed. Within seconds after that she had Silver’s address book. And moments later a street name in the peninsula: 4784 Jolson Road … It’s got to be, thought Marie.

  Swiftly, she removed from the contents of her own purse anything that might identify who she was. Then she put the stuff back into the two purses.

  A minute after that she was in the car. She started the motor, and turned on the headlights. Noticed that she “had left the kitchen door ajar. Out of the car for additional seconds to shut and lock it. Back, next, into the driver’s seat. Activate with a pushbutton the power that automatically opened the garage door behind the car. Ease the machine backward into the street. Remote-control close and lock the garage door.

  And head.

  And the shadow ship started to emerge from its shadow. And there was ever so tiny time distortion. And reality twisted … slightly.

  Chapter Thirteen

  AFTER THE TIME SHIFT

  Basic reality.

  Earth shivered in a momentary absence of vibration. For a split moment the solar system wasn’t. And then was again.

  The split moment was less than a billionth of a second. But a time shift occurred for connected persons. For Marie, who was one of those persons, the process was complex.

  … Marie struggled up through the pictures and sounds of a dream. Partly awake, finally, but still groggy, she switched on the light and sat up. Her bedside clock showed twenty minutes to one. There was a blue book lying on the bed. Vague surprise, then, as she realized it was not Carl’s Women Are Doomed.

  With a careless flick of the hand, she knocked the volume onto the floor; noticed as it flew through the air that it was a bestseller of several months earlier, Pimmler’s Dummy, by the celebrated author, Sam Locke … How did that get there? I thought I gave it to Mrs. Gray—

  She became aware that she was casually stripping off her clothes, tossing them… Funny, I must have lain down fully dressed—

  Forgot that, also.

  She danced lightly over, and stopped, swaying, in front of the ornamented—with gold leaf—full-length mirror that was built in to one of her wall panels. And gazed, entranced, at her unclothed body.

  What dimly startled Marie was that she had never done such a thing before in her entire life.

  Never looked at herself, nude.

  Oh, glances, yes. Unavoidable glimpses while bathing, disrobing, changing into and out of pajamas. This was different. This time she gazed wide-eyed and with searching intent.

  A kind of neural music started to play inside her. And that was new, also. She opened her mouth and spoke to the glowing image in the mirror. ‘How strange,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve never looked at you—ever—

  She stopped. What she had unquestionably heard was her own voice. Yet it wasn’t. There was a musical lilt in it. Never had that in her whole life.

  Standing there, Marie had a vague feeling that she had in the course of the evening made a decision to be like Silver. She couldn’t recall the exact moment of deciding that. But the feeling was there.

  Was it possible that a mere decision could change something as basic as a voice?

  Whatever the cause, no doubt of the effect. An end had been made of drab Marie.

  No—consciously, she corrected that, also—the drabness had always been inside her, not outside. Else, those men—like MacKerrie (and earlier, Carl)—wouldn’t have kept grabbing her and forcing her over to the bed. To them, she must look alive.

  Thoughts of MacKerrie and Carl reminded her of Nicer. Happy again, she loped over to the phone, and dialed his number. For some reason, she was not surprised when his voice came on, and said one of those non-identifying things. But it was his voice.

  Marie, who by now was deliciously ensconced under the satin sheets, and still deliciously without clothes, said in that trilling musical voice, ‘Marie speaking, Phil. Hope it isn’t too late for a call.’

  Not that simple. For Nicer, the time was several weeks before he had met Marie—except for long ago when his father was still on the board of the Non-Pareil Corporation. But he recognized a shadow condition and an harmonic voice when it manifested, and deduced the rest. So he said, ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Marie—of course.’ The lilting voice suddenly uncertain.

  Nicer braced himself. The next question was going to be decisive. ‘I know several Maries but none has a voice like yours.’

  True, Marie thought cozily. No one has ever heard my Silver-ized voice before.

  ‘Marie Hazzard.’

  Nicer did not make the mistake of saying, ‘Oh—Hazzard Laboratories!’ But all kinds of future possibilities were falling in place. What he said was, ‘Where shall we meet?’

  Marie falsely remembered that Silver was sleeping in the next room. (That wouldn’t be for several weeks.) ‘The hotel,’ she said.

  ‘Got the name straight?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. The Westermore.’

  ‘And the room number?’

  ‘815.’ Joyously.

  ‘Okay. See you.’

  Nicer disconnected. And hastily called Hotel Westermore, and asked for a reservation for room 815.

  It was occupied.

  Hastily, he called Somebody Important, who called the hotel owner. A deal was made whereby the occupants of room 815 accepted $500 in cash, the hotel’s apologies, and another room free, and moved. All in ten minutes.

  Marie slipped into panties, glided into a nothing dress, stepped into high heels, and wrapped a coat around her … Really, she thought, a woman can be decent in one minute—

  It took another minute to check her purse. Seconds after that she was tiptoeing past Carl’s apartment, where she had left Silver sleeping. In the garage, a momentary puzzlement. Her Mercedes was not there. The dismissing thought came rapidly: John must have come late, and taken it, and was having something done to it in one of those all-night garages.

  John was a technician-employee who was paid extra to keep an eye on the cars, and make sure they were always in top condition and appearance.

  For Marie, it was no
problem to climb grandly into Carl’s seldom-used Cadillac…

  Arrived at the hotel, she went straight upstairs like any proper guest. The key Nicer had given her worked. So her coining was all very discreet, as it should be; no one noticing the singing body, and no one speaking in a way that she had to answer.

  She undressed and lay in the bed without any clothes on, and presently had a faraway thought from deep in her mind where the old Marie was sleeping but not dead. From that depth came the first argument against the automaticness and shamelessness of what she was doing, in the form of an aphoristic pun.

  She smiled, and spoke it in all its greatness into the silence of the room: ‘You cannot keep a good woman down—for long. So you’d better hurry’, Philip Nicer.’

  Within instants after she finished speaking, as if her words were the signal, a key moved softly in the door. When it opened, moments later, the man was briefly silhouetted against the hall light. And it was he.

  Then he was inside, and the door closed behind him. Marie was aware of him coming towards her. The room suffered from a few glints of light coming through the drawn blinds; so she could see him as he walked towards her. Even in that almost night, there was a way he held himself—a Real Man, she thought.

  It reminded her slightly of Carl. An impression of strength and determination. He sank down on the edge of the bed beside her. That close she could see he was smiling.

  Still smiling, he bent down toward her. She braced ever so slightly. But it was a very soft-lipped kiss that he gave her.

  When the kiss ended, he drew away, and up, and back into the darkness. She heard his undressing movements.

  His body, she discovered, was much firmer than MacKerrie’s, as she clearly recalled it, or Carl’s—as she vaguely remembered it. Much firmer. Much.

  He was not heavy. But the all-over hardness of him was an unexpected and surprisingly pleasant shock. She felt an enormous vitality from him.

  Yet for a while he talked more than he acted.