“For good?”
“For good. He has wired his agent to pick up our theatrical equipment here and dispose of it. There will be no more Coleman the Great.”
My hands were shaking. I could sense Cleo being snatched out of my grasp. I dragged deeply on my cigarette.
I thought of Johnson. Wouldn’t he like to know about this! Or maybe he did. The B. I. S. had ways of knowing things. So what would he do—tell Coleman he had to take little Gil along, wherever he was going? What a lousy spy I was, out of a job before I was in it!
“I thought Roy was a showman,” I said harshly. “I never heard of a real showman walking out on a performance.”
“Why not? The show isn’t important now. You don’t understand, Gil, Roy is something quite different from what you think he is—something truly great and wonderful. You saw Bilfax. He’s Roy’s greatest enemy. Bilfax is closing in on Roy…he’s dangerous! But what’s the difference? We’re leaving, that’s all, Gil. This check will make it right with you. You can go back to your job at the agency—”
“Sure. I’m not worried about myself, Cleo. It’s you. You’re living dangerously, and I want to get you out of it.”
“You can’t. Roy happens to be a scientist, Gil. His illusions…well, they’re real not faked. You’ve probably guessed. There are people who would like to get their hands on the secrets Roy controls.”
“People like the U. S. Government?”
She looked at me candidly. Her golden eyes did things to me inside.
“And a few others. That’s all I can say.”
I was feeling the rye, and reckless, too.
“Huh-uh. There’s something else you can say, darling. I keep remembering three years ago…”
“Gil!”
“Save the shock, baby. You want me back and you know it. You’re still in love with me, Cleo, like I’m in love with you!”
She looked wretched and white. Her eyes searched mine, with something frantic in them.
“You know it’s the truth, darling. Why fight it?”
I leaned over and kissed her full on the mouth, pressing down hard, grinding her lips under mine. For just a moment she yielded. I thought it was capitulation. It wasn’t. It was just to slide down in the chair and get a purchase to push me away. I staggered back.
She stood, calmly straightening her skirt. She didn’t look at me. “I’m sorry you did that, Gil.”
“Why? I’m not sorry!” I snatched Coleman’s check from the arm of the chair, where she had dropped it, and tore it across. “I loved every split second of it!” I handed her the pieces. “Why should you be sorry, knowing I love you?”
“That’s why I am sorry, Gil. Roy is my husband.”
CHAPTER 4
One century, two centuries…eons marched, tolling their years with leaden bells.
“You lie!”
My eyes searched her left hand.
“That is unkind, Gil. I don’t wear rings, for professional reasons. But I am Roy’s wife. It’s true.”
Winter in June, snow in July. The leaden bells clamor. I pressed my hand against my eyes.
And I heard Cleo scream.
I responded fast, all the primitive in me surging up. There was a man in the room, his back toward me, and Cleo struggled in his grip. He could only have got there by matter transmitter. Bilfax! I gripped his shoulder, whirled him around. It wasn’t Bilfax; it was somebody I had never seen before.
I slugged him behind the ear, and he went down, still with a mad, ferocious look on his face. And then the room swarmed with men, closing in on us. I saw Bilfax—for sure this time, and Willie, Tom and Joe. Bright needles of flame, spat and crackled. Nobody got hurt but me…something hit me from behind…
* * * *
I was just waiting for a ’copter bus, I told myself, then along came this truck… I opened my eyes. I didn’t know where I was, but I knew it was a hospital. Everything was white, all around, the walls, the bed; and the sandy-haired young doctor bending over me was clad in white. He was just pulling a needle out of my arm when I woke up.
None of it registered with me. I watched him vacantly, waiting for him to say something, like, “This is a hospital,” or, “You’ve been in an accident,” or something like that. But he didn’t say anything; he just smiled and patted my arm with cotton that was cool and wet.
Then he straightened and said something over his shoulder to people standing there I hadn’t noticed. He spoke in a foreign language, and I saw he was talking to Coleman and Willie.
Coleman smiled at me. “The doctor says you’re okay now, Gil.”
“Thanks.” My tongue was thick and Willie said, grinning, “You had a close call; a needle-bolt missed your skull by a bare two inches.”
“I must be tough,” I said. “I let the breeze knock me down.”
“A needle-bolt can be fatal within six inches of the head!” reproved Coleman. He was wearing some kind of a dark blue, single-piece garment that looked like a uniform. He said, “You’re lucky to lose only ten days, instead of your life.”
So it had been ten days. Then I remembered what Cleo had told me last night…ten days ago, and I thought I ought to hate this man standing by my bed. But I couldn’t. He had saved my life.
Coleman leaned over me, squeezed my shoulder. “You’ll be up and around tomorrow. Don’t worry about anything.”
“How about Cleo…?”
“She’s safe, thanks to you.”
I shut my eyes. Coleman had looked solemn. Where would Coleman be now if Cleo had fallen into Bilfax’s hands? What was up between Coleman and Bilfax? My mind balked at that path.
“You’re friends play rough,” I grunted.
Coleman’s eyes looked deep and calculating. “The bigger the game, the rougher the contestants play, Gil.”
“You call this a game?” I touched the back of my head, expecting to feel bandages. There weren’t any; the hair was short and fuzzy, growing in.
“A little hair off the back,” grinned Coleman. “It’ll grow.”
He and Willie said goodbye and left. The doc went out, and by and by an orderly brought me a tray of food.
Cleo came in as I finished. She took the tray of dishes, placed it on the nightstand. She sat down with the dirty dishes between us.
“I brought you some cigarettes.” She offered me an opened pack. I took one, she lit it, and dropped the pack beside the tray.
“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” I said, drawing deep.
“It was all my fault, Gil. I should have worn my body shield when I dropped in on you.”
I thought of her body against mine when I had manhandled her, and I was glad she hadn’t been wearing a shield. “I guess Bilfax’s man wasn’t wearing his, either, or I couldn’t have slugged him.”
“And he couldn’t have touched me, either.” Her eyes were golden, a frightening combination with her flame-red hair. “Thanks, Gil.”
“Skip it. I’m going home tomorrow and forget the whole thing.”
She shook her head. “If you mean to your apartment, it’s over a thousand miles away. We had to bring you here for treatment.”
“More matter transmitting,” I suggested.
“That doesn’t work over a long range. We brought you by ’copter. You’re at Roy’s base of operations, in the mountains.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that. I was almost afraid to find out.
She went on. “You will have to stay with us, now. Roy thinks it’s better that way, now that you’ve gotten in as deeply as you have.”
“How do I know when it’s too deep? When I drown?”
I looked into her eyes, knowing it could happen there.
“Let’s hope it won’t come to that, Gil.”
Had she guessed my meaning? Frustration clamped my brain. I reache
d for her hand. Oddly enough, she let me take it.
“I remember sounding off,” I mumbled. “Sorry, Cleo. I guess it’s too late now…”
“Far too late, Gil.”
A look of exalted dedication came over her face. Whatever it was Cleo had been seeking when she left me, she had obviously found it. I said, brooding, “Tell me what it’s all about, Cleo.”
She was thoughtful, seeming reluctant to speak. I took my hand away.
“I’m in it,” I said bitterly, “without knowing what it is!”
She made the flames dance on her head, and frowned. “I’m trying to think how to tell you. I knew I would have to. It isn’t easy. Roy agrees you should know, if you will believe…”
“I’d believe it if you say he’s the man in the moon.”
I rubbed my fuzzy afterskull gingerly.
Her eyes gleamed molten gold. “Not the man in the moon, maybe…something more remote. His name isn’t Coleman…among Roy’s kind, he has a different name.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“Roy isn’t from anyplace on Earth…or the moon, either. He comes from a distant solar system, across the galaxy.”
Her words trickled into silence. I was thinking furiously. It all fitted, of course. “What’s he doing here?”
“He had to earn some money, Gil.”
“Don’t they have money where he comes from?” It was a facetious question. She shrugged it aside.
“Roy never wanted to come here. I like to think it was Fate, so that I…well, it was an accident, sort of. It’s against the law of Roy’s people to land on a…backward…planet like Earth. They are extremely advanced scientifically. Their…history goes back a million years before ours. We’re…well, we’re savages to them, not yet ready to take our place alongside the real civilizations of the galaxy.”
“He, the man, and we, the apes,” I said, bitterly.
She was looking ceilingward, her eyes mirroring fright.
In that tipping of her head and the turning of her eyes upward, I read a world of thoughts, of things that couldn’t be expressed in mere words.
“There’s a war going on out there,” she said breathlessly. She looked me full in the face. “I said we are savages, but maybe you’re right…we’re apes.” She tossed her head defiantly. “You’re wondering why Roy’s people don’t show themselves to us, offering us a helping hand?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.”
“They did that sort of thing, once; thousands of years ago. They discovered retarded cultures, like ours, among the stars, and taught them…tried to lift them up. It didn’t work. You lose the use of your own legs when you walk with the aid of a crutch. Other races took the shock of change differently. Bilfax’s race was one. They learned all Roy’s people could teach them, then renounced their mentors. They had been introduced to the future too soon, and it unbalanced them; they began to war against worlds around them. When Roy’s people moved to stop them, they turned on them. That war has been going on for thousands of years. There’s no such thing as blitzkrieg in interstellar warfare…
“Anyway, Earth is in enemy territory, a segment of the galaxy dominated by Bilfax’s race. Earth, to them, is an unimportant place. They consider us savages, too…or apes. But they are no better than apes, themselves.
“Five years ago, Roy brought his spaceship near here on a cruising expedition. It met an enemy cruiser. The engines were destroyed, but Roy escaped with his ship and part of his crew.”
“Escaped to Earth?”
“He brought the ship down here, yes. The damage was terrible. I couldn’t understand Roy’s explanation—it all has to do with space and time and the tremendous distances involved in traveling among the stars. You can imagine the complexity, and delicacy, of such a drive. And it was destroyed.”
“And Roy set down on Earth for repairs?”
“He is almost finished; it has been terribly costly. And Roy was all alone, with the fifty men left in his crew. He couldn’t call on his own for help. At first, he thought we could help him, but the dismaying truth is that our technology can’t even produce the parts he needed!”
“So he had to produce them himself.”
“Worse than that. He had to build the machines to produce the parts he needed. You can see how it was… and he had nothing to use for money.”
“He could have stolen what he needed.”
She gave me a smile of grim exasperation.
“Steal what didn’t exist? The materials he could buy—a few things he could have made—but money was the first need. It’s one of the peculiar aspects of our culture. He dared not reveal himself to us—you may be sure he’s dedicated along the lines of that concept. He studied our culture, and decided he could earn the most money, most quickly, in show business. So he became a stage magician—”
“Is that his line…out there?” I looked ceilingward.
She allowed herself a polite laugh. “Far from it! Roy is a scientist, a technician, a commander in the space navy, a…a person of high importance in the affairs of his own world. He saw how his scientific knowledge could help him produce stage illusions that would defy the explanation of our experts. This superior science is commonplace to him—to us…ignorant apes…it’s really and truly magic.”
“I see what you mean.”
“Roy has earned the money he needed, Gil.”
“And now he’s leaving Earth?”
“Not…yet. As soon as the final tests and adjustments are made. He’s expecting a shipment, or something, soon. But he is in a hurry, of course. You see—Bilfax has finally located Roy’s ship!”
The puzzle made a picture, now that I had all—or almost all—the pieces. I didn’t relish being caught between the opposing millstones of an interstellar war.
I felt like a man clinging to a rock on a nameless shore, washed by a tide of great force, insensate, of which I suffered the relentless wash without understanding. I saw the universe of stars in a new way, knowing their host of peopled worlds, where men strode among men; and I felt that our way was like the hanging by tails of monkeys in trees.
But were they so different, after all, these men of the galactic spaces? Didn’t they have the same passions and appetites as we, the same aspirations, both holy and unholy? Didn’t they, for all their million years of science in advance of us, love and breed the same way we do, build their cities, carry on trade, engage in occupations of peace and war?
Surely, man is the same wherever he is, whatever his race, his name, his technology…
Where was Bilfax now? Up there, perhaps, floating among the atoms of rarefied air in the upper atmosphere, biding his time to strike. Such as Bilfax would take no account of the difference between the man he sought to capture or slay, and the apelings drawn into this web of supercosmic intrigue.
I was grateful to Coleman for saving my life, but of what use was that life to me if Bilfax struck, or if… “You are leaving with him,” I said.
“I’m going with him, Gil.”
“Have you thought what it will be like?”
“He loves me, Gil, and I love him. What can make any difference between us, so long as we have that?
“Will you still have it, once you are set down on his world like a howling orangutan at a Fifth Avenue tea.” She flushed. “I don’t like that simile.”
“The least you can say is that you are a live mummy from a million years in the prehistory of his race!”
“At least, Gil, I’m a live mummy!”
CHAPTER 5
Coleman’s installation nestled in a cup of the mountains. There was snow on the slopes, and sentinel firs to the timberline. Below, the valley wore a spiky carpet of dark green forest, and the thin, silver thread of a stream curved through it. The air was cold, and it smelled of the forest and snow.
The bu
ilding was long and low, built in board-and-batten style, with a roof of corrugated aluminum. Every piece had had to be brought in by helicopter. The far end was devoted to a machine shop. My late quarters, from which Cleo had conducted me that morning, was a sick bay, rather than a hospital. It adjoined the living quarters,: where the crew on surface duty slept, the kitchen, dining and recreation rooms. I could see no ship.
On the west, the downhill side, a natural shelf had been further leveled to afford a ’copter park. Two machines were parked there—one, a heavy duty ’copter for transporting freight, and a smaller one, for personal use.
Around the field, on its perimeter, were half a dozen rudely made sheds.
I shivered in the unusual chill. “Where’s the ship—in the machine shop?”
Cleo shook her head. “It’s far too big. He buried it—” She gestured to the mountain slope, where drifts of rubble, great boulders, and snow, created a fantastic moonscape of tumbled proportions, an uneven talus perhaps a thousand feet deep. “They turned nuclear weapons on the mountain to create a slide.”
I was stunned. I could visualize slashing rays, beams, I don’t know what, carving at the rocky face of the mountain, the great mass of detritus falling, sliding, rushing down upon the spaceship. What a ship it must be, how well anchored, to have withstood the hammering rush of millions of tons of rock.
“There’s a tunnel leading to the ship,” she went on. We walked in the direction of it. “Of course, it’s disguised as a mine. Roy even has a claim, properly filed, and all the papers. It’s supposed to be an exploratory shaft, in search of a vein of uranium.”
We stood at the tunnel entrance. A shaft, rigged with an elevator, went down and down into blackness. The machinery whined and grumbled. The elevator came up with a group of men.
“Roy runs his crew in shifts, around the clock. They’re very close to completing their work.” Her look clouded. “Now that Bilfax has located the ship, Roy is driving himself…”
Willie detached himself from the group and approached. “Our shipment has come in. I’m going to town and pick it up. Anything you’d like?” He was looking at Cleo, and he didn’t look like a superman.
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 14
