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Those in the know in Washington, D.C., upon seeing Brent Taber rush to ataxi or dodge a pedestrian on Pennsylvania Avenue, could well say,"There walks power." But there were few indeed who possessed enoughknowledge of the Washington inner structure to be able to make thisobservation.
Brent looked more like a coal heaver than a public servant with awell-oiled escalator into the White House. He appeared more able todirect a gang of dock workers than to jockey a delicate issue throughthe bloody jungle of national politics. Many of the people who acceptedthis deception did so at their peril and were not around any more. Toothers not so foolish, Brent Taber symbolized a completely necessaryfacet of a working democracy--secret government. This necessity sprangfrom the realization that even an open society must maintain areas ofprivacy or it is doomed.
Such was the man, and such was his mission of the moment--an issue ofthe utmost secrecy. So hush-hush, in fact, was this mission that whenBrent Taber arrived at his office that morning and found Senator Cranepacing his reception-room carpet, his heavy eyebrows gathered and hebegan mentally checking his "tight ship" for a leak.
Senator Crane was the exact opposite of Brent, in that he looked to beexactly what he was; a figure rigidly type-cast to the role of ablustering, tactless servant of the people. Which, in Crane's case,meant that he was a servant of Crane's career and any faction of hissupporters that could further it. Still, the Senator could not be calleddishonest. He was merely a flexible rationalizer. He sincerely believedthat what was good for Crane was good for the "folks back home."
And just now, he felt that a knowledge of what the hell was going on inBrent Taber's orbit was probably not good for anybody and had better beaired.
As Brent entered, Crane came right to the point. "Goddamn it, Taber,just what in blazes is going on around here?"
Brent's thick lips hardly moved, a characteristic that Crane foundinfuriating because that was the way shady characters talked intoSenatorial investigation microphones and it looked pretty bad. ButBrent's words came quite clear: "Routine business, Senator--an honesteffort to get a day's work done."
"You mean to tell me the meeting that's been set up here is routine?"
Brent shrugged. "Meetings are meetings, Senator."
Crane ticked it off on his fat fingers. "Pender of the Army, Bright ofthe Navy, Jones of the Air Force, Hagen of the FBI, Wilson fromTreasury--they all trooped through here into your private conferenceroom." He pointed pompously at his own chest. "But Crane of theSenate--"
"You forgot Birch of the State Department," Brent cut in. "Or hasn't hearrived yet?"
"--Crane of the Senate is barred! Now just what in the hell--?"
There are times for tact and times for bluntness, and this was a time,Brent decided, for the latter. "What goes on here, Senator," he said,"is none of your business. Otherwise, you would have been invited."
Crane's face darkened and Brent thought pleasantly of a brain hemorrhageblowing the top of his fat head off. But this was too much to hope for.
"Brent," Crane exploded, "I'll get you! So help me, I'll get you! Justwho the hell do you think you are--demeaning the dignity of the UnitedStates Senate? Just who are you to say what the people should or shouldnot know?"
"Decisions of that nature are made upstairs, Senator. I don't presume topossess the judgment needed in such matters."
"You're an arrogant bureaucrat! Your kind comes and goes because whenyou get too goddamned arrogant the people rise up in their wrath andknock you off."
Marcia Holly, Brent's secretary, was studiously transcribing some notesand Brent turned his scowl on her because, damn it, she was laughinglike hell at the whole thing. And, by God, a secretary didn't have theright to laugh at a United States Senator, even with her eyes, no matterhow much a congenital idiot he was.
"I'm sorry, Senator," Brent said. "If you have a complaint, please takeit up with my superiors. Just now I--"
"Your superiors? And who the devil are they? Who can find them? Where dothey have offices? Go around trying to find your superiors and nobodyever heard of you."
Brent half smiled as he felt a sneaking admiration for Crane. Theson-of-a-bitch had a disarming quality of honesty. If he planned toknife you, he drove straight in, the knife held high.
"One of the disadvantages of being a negative personality, Senator,"Brent murmured.
"Sure! You're about as negative as a charging grizzly," Crane snortedand headed for the door as though his air had been cut off.
After his bulk had vanished into the corridor, Brent turned a scowl onMarcia Holly. "And what are you snickering about."
She raised large blue, innocent eyes. "Me? I? Oh, golly. I just found acute little Freudian slip in these notes and--"
"Shut up. Are they all here?"
"Birch of the State Department sent regrets. A duty call on theTasmanian Embassy or something."
"Okay--and next week he'll be screaming to high heaven about being leftout."
Marcia's laughing eyes agreed. "Ain't it the truth?" she marveled.
Brent strode past her and expertly mussed her sleek hairdo in a quickgesture. As he entered his private conference room, he turned andgrinned at her silent fury.
Inside, they were all waiting for him, seated around a teakwood table.The wall-to-wall carpeting was wine-red. The chairs were deep andupholstered. And the men who sat in them were distinguished only bytheir surroundings and their uniforms. Their metal and their worth werehidden inside.
Brent moved to the end of the table and scanned them moodily. "Okay,gentlemen. I'll talk. Then if you have any questions--shoot them." Hetook a deep breath and began:
"We are faced with a situation that must be kept top secret for tworeasons: First, it may be the first move in an attempt to subjugate ordestroy our planet; two, it is so utterly ridiculous on its face that apublic announcement would be greeted by hoots of laughter from pole topole." Brent's ugly scowl deepened at what he seemed to feel was aninjustice. "Even the Eskimos would get a yack out of it."
The group waited, withholding judgment, evidently waiting to see whetheror not it was a laughing matter. They were conceding nothing. Brentstudied them for a moment and then went on.
"Last week, in Denver, early in the morning," he said, "a man was founddead on a residential-section street. There was no apparent cause ofdeath. A routine autopsy revealed some peculiar things about the man'sinsides. For one thing, he had two hearts--"
Jones of the Air Force, a dignified, gray-haired man, paused in firinghis cigar and gave the impression he was lighting his way through thedarkness. Bright of the Navy, a thin man with a huge Adam's apple,allowed it to bob three times in deference to the startling nature ofBrent's statement. Pender of the Army raised one eyebrow and let itfall. To a keen observer, Hagen of the FBI would have revealed priorknowledge by reacting not at all.
His mind was on the kid. He was thinking, _Christ! With all the damnedmiracle drugs and characters orbiting the earth in crazy capsules, theystill haven't figured out a way to keep a six-year-old from getting acold._ He remembered the kid waving from the window yesterdaymorning--when he'd been ordered East to attend this clambake--standingthere beside Miriam, waving good-bye and barking like a sea lion. _Whatthe hell was wrong with doctors? Why didn't they get with it on astupidly simple thing like the common cold?_
" ... two hearts and--" Brent reached to the left and pulled down achart on a window shade-type rack that stood beside his chair, "--arather interesting arrangement of the internal organs." He pointed witha thick finger. "You'll notice that the liver is exceptionally small,while the kidneys are large enough to service a horse. You'll note alsothat while the man had testicles, there is no prostrate gland."
The group waited in a kind of guarded abeyance that could be easilysensed. Their silence gave the impression that they were asking: _Issomebody kidding us?_
But there was certainly no lightness in Brent's manner. His arm droppedand he scowled at the far end of the table as he
said, "Now, the blood.There was something strange about the blood--"
The door from Marcia Holly's reception room-office opened and she camein silently, followed by a white-coated waiter who set a tray on thetable. The coffeepot on the tray was silver; the cups, fine china; thenapkins, linen.
"--something very strange about the blood in that it conformed to allnecessary specifications and yet it had a synthetic quality about it..."
Goose pimples formed on Hagen's neck and walked gently down his spine.Nothing was missing in this setup--synthetic blood, two hearts, oversizekidneys. Hagen got a quick mental flash of a barker outside a circussideshow: _He walks like a man. He talks like a man. But for a thindime, folks, you can see--_
It was something to think and wonder about. And back in Chicago, he'dhad lots of company. Everybody in the office that night had wondered,and you could see the vague uneasiness in their eyes as the creaturesat, acting like a human being and, at the same time, like nothing fromthis world. You could see a vague revulsion in the people surroundingthe creature. There was also uncertainty, and this from men who wererequired by their profession to be fairly certain about most things.
"The blood," Jones of the Air Force said. "Could it have been a--well, anew kind of plasma?"
"Hardly. You see, the variation was almost theoretical, if you canunderstand the term as I'm using it. Drawn from an ordinary human being,it would not have been questioned. It was just that in the light ofother oddities in his man, it didn't seem right, somehow."
"Pretty vague," Bright of the Army said.
"This I'll grant you." Brent said. "Anybody for coffee?"
Nobody was for coffee so Marcia and the waiter retired and Brent said,"Vague, I'll grant you. But let's get on with it. Two days later, a man,in every way identical, was found lying in the street in Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania. He was alive, but in a dying condition, and he succumbedon the way to the hospital. Cause of death, as in the first place,undeterminable. But the medics think it was some malfunctioning of thelungs.
"All in all, gentlemen, eight identical specimens have been picked up invarious American cities. Five are dead, two more are now in a comatosecondition, at last report, and may very well be dead at this time. Oneis still alive and relatively healthy...."
Alive and relatively healthy. The son-of-a-bitch! Hagen felt an oddsenseless rage against the creature they'd picked up in a Chicago bar.
Ordinarily it would have been a simple bull-pen, night-court case--aloud-mouth drunk refusing to pay for a drink. But much of his talk,anent enemy invasion, internal destruction, and civilian chaos, had beena little too rough for the other barflies to swallow, and complaints hadbeen made. Later, when Bureau men went around trying to get somethingtangible in the way of evidence, they found themselves dealing infrustration. The complainants had left without giving their names. Thebarkeep really hadn't heard anything. The actual charges had gone up insmoke. But by that time, Washington was very much interested. The manwas questioned and it was the damnedest thing Hagen had ever gonethrough ...
"By identical," Jones of the Air Force said, "you of course mean--"
Brent's dark, knifelike eyes sliced out at Jones. "By identical, I meanjust that."
Bright's throat bobbed as the astonishing implication came home to him."Hell, man! You mean--"
"I mean these specimens do not merely bear a resemblance to each other.They were not just similar as to organisms and physical structure. Theywere all _exactly_ alike; as alike as eight new cars of the same makeand model lined up side by side ..."
_Identical._ Hagen didn't know anything about that. He hadn't seen theothers. But he knew that there was something frightening about the onethey'd picked up in Chicago. At first glance he could have been Mr.Anybody, from Anywhere, U.S.A. A youngish-looking forty, you would havefigured, with a sprinkling of gray at the temples and a face women couldhave found interesting. He had the unpaunched figure of a man who hadtaken good care of himself; he was quietly dressed in a blue suit; helooked like a decent-enough guy who just happened to have gotten stiffon the double hooker he'd ordered and sounded off without meaning to.
In fact, he was still sounding off when they got him into theinterrogation room. And when the barflies called his talk treasonable,they hadn't been fooling.
Brent said, "Identical, gentlemen, even to the finger-prints; to thevery last ridge."
Pender's eyebrows tried to crawl up his forehead and disappear into hishairline. "That's utterly and completely ridiculous."
Brent smiled. "Then, at least, I've gotten one idea over to you--that apublic release on this thing would be greeted with hoots of derision bythe realistic American public."
"And perhaps deservedly so?"
"I think not," Brent said gravely.
_Is it some incredibly ingenious hoax?_ Hagen asked himself the questionand found no answer. He only remembered the words and the eyes and thetone of the creature that walked like a man ...
"He was our--father. They had him a long time before we--came. He wasour father, and after we came they told us what we were to know and weknew--it."
There it was--that odd little break, cutting off the word at the end ofeach sentence. It gave the impression of a mind groping, yet not reallygroping; a mind sure of itself, yet wondering.
"What did you know?"
"We knew what we were--for. Our--reason. We knew what we were created todo--here."
"How many of you were there?"
"Ten of--us."
"You said, 'created to do here.' Where do you come from?"
"There."
"Where is _there_?"
At this point the man or the creature, or whatever you wanted to callhim, pointed upward.
At this point, Cantrell, another of the interrogation group, turned awayin disgust. "A kook! A kook with a religious compulsion. A character,and we got called out of bed to--"
"--to get you ready to be destroyed," the creature cut in.
"By fire and brimstone on judgment day?" Cantrell asked sarcastically.
"No. By rendering you helpless by--"
Here the creature swallowed, blinked and looked surprised--and changedmagically. He--if it really was a he--didn't jump up and kick a hole inthe ceiling or anything like that. In fact, nothing tangible happened.There just seemed to be an invisible barrier that rose suddenly aroundhim.
Then there was the thing that chilled every man in the room; a thing astangible as the walls and the furniture; yet a thing no man could definein words.
This was when Cantrell, a high-strung individual at best, reactedviolently to the change in the creature. In an instinctive blaze ofanger and frustration, Cantrell reached out and slapped him brutallyacross the face.
Velie, the agent in charge, also acted instinctively as he lungedforward to restrain Cantrell. But then he froze, as did all the men inthe room, to stare.
It was not what the prisoner did; it was what he did not do. There wasabsolutely no reaction to the blow--no reaction physically, emotionally,or mentally. It was as though the blow had not been struck; as thoughthis were some kind of a moving, breathing zombie.
So tangible, so seemingly sourceless was this feeling of loathing, thatHagen would have been sure it had affected only himself if he had notseen its effect on the others.
Yet none of them referred to it. Nor was this strange, because therejust weren't any words to describe the feeling one gets from contactwith a pleasant-faced, quietly dressed example of the walking dead.
Backing away from this powerful emotional reaction, Hagen forced himselfonto an intellectual level, and asked himself what had brought about thechange in the creature. Why had it--Hagen now had to regard the strange,walking enigma as neuter--after functioning to some extent as a human,reverted suddenly to what seemed to be its natural state?
He conceded that if he knew the answer to that one, he could be of greatservice to the FBI and the nation--and, no doubt to the world ...
Pender of the Army now had a question.
"What information have you gottenfrom the surviving man?"
"Not a great deal, as yet. However, in our experiments we've learnedsomething rather frightening."
"And what's that?"
"He is totally impervious to drugs of any description whatever."
"That's impossible!"
"So it would seem. But the sodium pentathol injection he was given couldjust as well have been so much water."
The group pondered this information, each after his own fashion. ThenBirch of the State Department made a precise, scholarly observation."Incredible!"
Brent smiled faintly. "One point of vital importance. We do know thatthere were, originally, ten of these creatures roaming the country.Eight are accounted for. The other two are still at large."
Jones of the Air Force asked, "Were all eight apprehended in largecities?"
"Yes."
"Shouldn't that mean something to us?"
"Well, it's a pattern, all right, but no one's been able to give it anymeaning--so far."
No one had any further comment on that point. Brent waited a moment andthen threw the bombshell. "We are quite sure that these creatures are ofextraterrestrial origin."
For a time it seemed as though Brent's bombshell had been a dud. Therewas no comment from around the table--no sound of any kind. But each manwas evaluating the information after his own fashion. The key thought,no doubt, other than a natural and instinctive moment of sheer unbelief,was that this marked a giant, forward lunge in world history. And also,no doubt, in this group of responsible men, there was a common question:It would appear that our world had at last come to grips with theuniverse around it. Was our world ready?
And there was general doubt.
Now the questions came. From whence? To what purpose? Hostile? Benign?Dangerous? Harmless?
"What other information was gained from the creature?"
"Very little. He knows our language. He is here for a definite andclear-cut purpose. Probably hostile. But what he was supposed to do orhow he was supposed to accomplish it we do not know."
"Do you think you will eventually get these answers?"
"I think," and there was an ominous note in Brent's voice, "that wewill. If not from the creature himself, then in some sudden and far moreviolent manner."
This statement also had impact. It seemed that the group had overlookedBrent's previous revelation that ten of the creatures had arrived andonly eight had been accounted for.
"Perhaps," Jones said hopefully, "whatever their plan, it required theparticipation of all ten."
"In that case," Brent said quietly, "we have nothing to worry about. Atleast, at the moment."
"Are you of the opinion that these creatures have been dropped anywhereelse on earth?"
"All I can say on that score is that all seems quiet around the world.Of course, if Russia has rounded up a quota of these two-heartedcharacters they wouldn't be likely to tell us. They certainly haven'tshown up in the European countries with whom we consult. All I can sayabout the situation behind the Iron Curtain is that they have made noinquiries of us relative to the matter--and we certainly have made noinquiries of them. Also, our people in the sensitive Eastern areasreport nothing indicative."
Pender bobbed his throat and said, "You told us you're sure thecreatures are from outer space. That makes our interests with Russiamutual. Therefore, why shouldn't open inquiry be made?"
Brent frowned. "An entirely logical question. As a matter of fact, Irecommended that course. Nothing has been down in that direction,however. At least, not to my knowledge."
"I assume the White House knows about this."
Brent nodded but did not elaborate, perhaps because to have done sowould have tended to clarify his own connection with the top spot in thenation; a relationship accepted but not thoroughly understood by any manpresent.
"May I inquire as to Senator Crane?" Bright asked.
"I see no reason why you shouldn't."
"He was in your anteroom when I entered. Obviously he was mad. I assumethat was because you excluded him from this meeting."
"Correct." Brent Taber's eyes turned a trifle steely. "In fact, I'd liketo know exactly how he found out about the meeting."
No one offered any data on this point and Bright asked, "Is it wise tokeep information of this vital nature from the United States Senate?"
"The information has not been kept from the United States Senate," Brentcorrected. "Let's say it has been kept from certain United StatesSenators on the theory that the interests of the nation can best beserved by a closed-door policy on this matter until it becomesclarified."
Whether they agreed or not, the men present accepted this as coming fromthe top, and they would automatically abide by it.
"I suppose," Pender said, "that every effort is being made to apprehendthe missing pair."
"Every effort of which we are capable."
"What conclusions have you drawn from the fact that these ten creaturesare identical?"
"That they are not human beings, in the strictest sense of the word,"Brent replied gravely.
"Then what are they?"
"We believe they are androids."
"And what the hell is an android?" Jones snapped.
"A synthetic." Brent smiled just slightly. "In this case, men not bornof women. All this is detailed in the confidential report that will behanded to you when you leave. The report, incidentally, is slanted in away that obscures its vital nature, but on the basis of what has beensaid at this meeting, I'm sure you'll find all your answers."
Brent paused, waiting for questions. When none came, he said, "I guessthat about covers it, gentlemen--at least, all that we have at themoment. You'll be kept informed. The meeting is adjourned."
He glanced around. "Oh, by the way, as you'll note in the confidentialreport, this project will be identified as 'Operation Blue Sky.'"
"Where did they get that one?" Jones snorted.
"I don't know. The term originated higher up. Possibly," Brent murmured,"because somewhere out in the blue sky lies the answer." His mannerchanged and he glanced briskly around. "Would anyone care for a cup ofcoffee?"
No one was interested in coffee and the group filed out.
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, the white-coated waiter came to pick up the things.He crossed to the coffeepot, lifted it, and took a tiny device out ofthe hidden space formed by the pot's legs and its bottom. This, heslipped into his pocket before picking up the tray and going out as he'dcome.
Ten From Infinity Page 2
